


Destination

by boombangbing



Series: Direction [9]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Dom/sub Undertones, Established Relationship, F/M, Frottage, POV Multiple, PTSD, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-24
Updated: 2013-06-02
Packaged: 2017-12-09 09:18:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 46,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/772557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boombangbing/pseuds/boombangbing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life has settled down for Steve and Darcy: Steve is finally dealing with some of his problems, and Darcy's coming to terms with her workplace, their friends are mostly happy and occasionally hooking up with each other, and everything's pretty good. Until life turns upside down again, that is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Steve's been having this recurring nightmare for the last couple of months. Darcy's doing something, anything – cooking, driving, watching TV, kissing him – and then... she's dead. She just... drops dead. 

It's not hard to work out what his subconscious is telling him. 

Before those men attacked her, he'd never really considered that one day she might not be around. Even when he worried about her leaving him, he never _really_ , deep down inside, believed that she would. She's been a constant presence in his life for almost a year, and he can barely remember what it was like to be here and not be with her – mostly he just recalls how incredibly sad and lonely he was.

But now he knows that she might, in fact, die; that she's not protected from life by virtue of being Darcy, and the knowledge of that has burrowed into his subconscious and set up shop. Dreams of her dying have taken over from dreams of dying himself, and he wishes he could get those back, he really does.

He wakes with a gasp, raising his head and feeling around for Darcy in the dark.

“Right here,” she mumbles, pulling him into her arms. He presses his forehead to her neck and tries to breathe, waiting for his heart to stop hammering.

-

“I had the nightmare again last night.”

The psychiatrist, Dr Tanaka, nods and writes something on her pad. “And how did that make you feel?”

“How'd you think it made me feel?” God, he really hates coming to see her, but he promised Darcy he would if she got through her S.H.I.E.L.D-mandated counselling.

Dr Tanaka raises her eyebrows. “Why don't you tell me?” she asks.

He huffs. “It scared me, I hate thinkin' about her dying, I'd rather have dreams about myself dying again.” Tanaka nods and doesn't say anything, and Steve shifts in his seat. “I mean... I'm a superhero, I'm meant to protect people, but I couldn't stop her from being attacked and now I get to see her death over and over in my head. I feel totally... powerless.”

Steve takes a breath as Tanaka writes something else on her pad. “I really hate when you write on that thing,” he blurts out.

She lifts her eyes to him, and stops writing. “Then I won't,” she says, setting the pen and pad aside. “Why do you want to dream about dying?”

“I don't _want_ to dream about it, I'd just prefer it to dreaming about her.”

“Do you think about dying a lot?”

He shrugs. “I guess. I think we all do, all of us... superheroes. I know Tony does.”

“We're not talking about Tony,” she admonishes gently. “In what ways do you think about dying?”

“Um... Drowning, freezing to death, being shot, being stabbed in the stomach – that's a new one. I guess drowning's the big one though.” He scratches at the back of his head. “That makes me seem really morbid. I'm not _fixated_ on death, or anything.” He doesn't think so, anyway.

Tanaka nods. “Okay. Does Darcy know that you have these dreams?”

“Yeah. I tell her everything. I tried to keep things under wraps for a while, and I just went crazier than I already was.”

“You aren't 'crazy', Steve,” Tanaka says.

He shrugs. “You know what I mean.”

“Mmhm,” she hums. “Have you ever thought about death in a more positive way?”

Steve frowns. “You mean, am I suicidal? _No_.”

“Have you ever been?”

Steve crosses his arms over his chest. “ _No_ ,” he repeats.

“Okay,” she says softly, “but you've said in other sessions that you had trouble when you first... arrived. Tell me about that.”

“What's to tell? I got thawed out and shoved into this loud, colourful world where everyone I knew was dead and nobody cared about old man Rogers any more. I was _sad_. I didn't want to _kill_ myself. I doubt I could even if I'd wanted to.” She raises her eyebrows at him and he rolls his eyes. God, he gets so petulant with this woman. “I don't mean it like that, don't read something into it.”

“I'm not reading anything into it,” she says evenly, and he can tell that she's just itching to write something on her pad. “I believe that you're not suicidal, but you do seem to be fairly preoccupied with death.”

“Well... yeah, I guess I am. It feels kind of... ever present. Which I guess it is for everyone, I don't think I'm unique, it's just... I've had a lot of time to think about it. Back... before, I wasn't looking at getting much past thirty and I knew that in my _soul_. I guess sometimes I still don't think I'm gonna make it to thirty.”

“And what are your feelings about death now?”

He looks at his knees and starts picking at his nails. “I don't know... that I want to die before Darcy? That I don't want to get left behind again?”

“Do you think perhaps Darcy wouldn't want you to die before her?”

“Probably, but she'd be okay, in the end.”

“And you wouldn't be?”

He shakes his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because... because I guess it almost destroyed me the first time, and I'm more... fragile now than I was back then.”

“I see,” she murmurs. The little timer on her desk dings, and she clears her throat. “I'm afraid that's the end of the session.”

He lets out a breath. “Thank God. No offence, Doctor, but I'm gonna go to the gym now and punch something.”

She laughs and extends her hand. He stands up, towering over her tiny frame, and shakes her hand. “No offence taken, Captain,” she says, “I'll see you next week?”

“Long as aliens don't invade again,” he says, grabbing his jacket. He's pretty sure he's used that joke before, but she smiles anyway.

-

“Still hate your therapist?” Sam asks as they work on his agility, running up and down a set of steps faster and faster.

“I don't hate her,” he says, and looks down at Sam's feet. “Watch your footwork. She's a perfectly nice woman. I'm just... I'm an old man, change scares me.”

Sam snorts. “Sure you are. Jesus, how fast are you going?”

“Faster than you,” he says, “come on, step it up.”

“I'm doing the best I can!” Sam says, and promptly trips, almost going over but for Steve grabbing the back of his t-shirt and hauling him up.

“If you're gonna be the 'Falcon', you've gotta be more agile than that.”

“Man, we're not all superhumans,” Sam grouses.

“Clearly,” Steve replies, and ducks Sam's answering shoulder punch.

“All right, I'm taking five,” Sam mutters, stepping back.

Steve rolls his eyes and hops off the steps. “Quitters don't make good superheroes,” he calls.

“Whatever, man,” Sam says, tossing a bottle of water at his back. Steve reaches behind himself and catches it. “Now that's just showing off,” Sam mutters.

Steve grins and comes over to sit on the edge of the boxing ring with him.

“You know, I've been through a few rounds of counselling myself,” Sam says.

“Yeah? You never told me that.”

“You haven't seemed to want to talk about it before. You're kind of... brittle, sometimes.”

Steve sighs. “Yeah, okay, fair point.”

Sam smiles. “Anyway, I had some court-mandated counselling sessions when I was teenager, and some not-mandated ones afterwards, and I used to do some substance abuse counselling before I got the job at the community centre. Sometimes it helps, if you let it.”

“I know, I know,” Steve mutters, running his fingers through his hair. “But I am old, you know? In a way, at least, and it just... pisses me off, sometimes.”

“You don't gotta be from the forties to get pissed off with therapists,” Sam says, “but hey, quitters don't make good superheroes.”

Steve laughs. “Okay, how about we go punch somethin'?”

-

They punch a lot of things, until Steve punches too hard and sends the bag rocketing across the room.

Sam raises his eyebrows. “I think we're done for today.”

Steve wipes sweat from his face. “Yeah...”

“Well timed,” Darcy calls from the door, “because I was about to suggest getting takeout, my treat.”

“Sure,” Sam says. “I'm free.”

Darcy grins and comes over to kiss Steve. Sam smirks and moves off. “Hey,” she murmurs.

He leans down and kisses her again. “Hey.”

“Your husband's a hard ass, you know that?” Sam calls as he disappears into the locker room.

Darcy laughs and leans up on her tiptoes. “Has a hard ass,” she whispers in Steve's ear.

“Very funny,” Steve says, pressing his fingers to her hips.

“I am very funny,” she agrees. “How'd your therapy session go?”

He shrugs. “It went fine. We talked about... my dreams.”

“The ones where I die?”

“Yeah,” he says softly.

“Did it help?”

“Didn't hurt.”

She tugs him into her arms. “Better than nothing, I guess. Come on, let's go get some delicious pho.”

-

“Hey, are one of you drawing a comic book?” Sam calls from the living room as Steve and Darcy are grabbing extra plates. Steve frowns, then remembers that he left his sketchpad open on the coffee table this morning.

“Uh, I am,” Steve says, coming back into the living room with the plates.

“I didn't know you could draw,” Sam says.

Steve shrugs and hands him a plate. “It's a pastime.”

“It's more than a 'pastime',” Darcy says, flopping down on the couch. “People pay him to draw stuff, and everything.”

“I've had two illustration jobs,” Steve says, “I'm not exactly a famous artist.”

“Not yet,” she says breezily.

“What's the comic about?” Sam asks, still leaning over to look at the open page of the pad.

“It's just about... my life, I guess,” Steve says, resisting the urge to shrug. “Well, it's about 'Joe's' life, but he's meant to be me. I don't know, it's really unpolished, and the writing is kind of shaky...”

Darcy smacks him in the arm and gives him a spring roll.

“Am I in your comic?” Sam asks.

“Uh... no, it's mostly just me and Darcy.”

“ _Can_ I be in your comic?”

Steve glances at Darcy, who grins and bumps his shoulder. “Um, sure... The character won't have your name, though.”

Sam shrugs. “That's fine. I just think it'd be cool to be immortalised in ink.”

“I'm not sure how 'immortal' this thing is going to be, but okay.”

“That thing's gonna be up there with the Sistine Chapel, no doubt,” Darcy says, and gives him another spring roll. He's pretty sure she's trying to use some positive reinforcement on him, but it's delicious, so he doesn't really mind.

-

The interview is Tony's idea. As with all things that Tony mentions, Steve is sceptical.

“It'll be like a double date, but filmed!” Tony says.

“I've never had much luck with double dates,” he says as he pays the hot dog vendor they're standing at (Tony abstained from getting anything, even when Steve offered to pay) and heaps ketchup and mustard on his hot dog, emptying the ketchup bottle. “Sorry,” he murmurs sheepishly, handing it back to the guy.

“No problem, you'd better take some napkins,” he replies, motioning to a metal container to one side.

“Thanks,” Steve says, grabbing a handful.

When he turns away, Tony slides his sunglasses down his nose and peers at the dog in disgust. “How can you eat that?”

“Mostly with my incisors,” he says, and takes a bite. He went a bit overboard with condiments, though, and some of the ketchup escapes and hits his chin. “Damn,” he mutters, wiping it away with the whole handful of napkins.

“Captain America, ladies and gentlemen,” Tony says. 

A couple of people turn and look at them, and Steve wills his sunglasses (which he's wearing because it's sunny, not expressly as a disguise!) to hide him.

“Look, if you don't deal with the media at some point, they'll never leave you alone,” Tony continues, waving at someone that's trying to take a picture of him on her cellphone.

“Won't they get bored, though? Move on to someone else? That's what Darcy says.” He gets a funny feeling that someone is watching him, other than the girl on her cellphone, but everything seems normal when he glances over his shoulder.

Tony glances back to, and Steve shakes his head. Tony shrugs. “And for most situations, your beautiful wife would be correct,” he continues, “but you, my friend, are a superhero, and every time something big happens and you swoop in to save the day, people start thinking, 'hey, what's up with Capiscle, didn't he cheat on his wife, or something?', and then gossip rags capitalise on that.”

Steve stops eating and clenches his jaw. “Tony...” he murmurs warningly.

Tony throws up his hands. “Which I'm not saying _you did_ , man, I know that you didn't, but the fine people of America don't know and that's the problem.”

“I'll ask Darcy.”

Tony waggles his eyebrows. “You need Darcy's permission?”

Steve frowns. “For something like this I do. As if you even breathe without Pepper's say so.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that, Captain,” Tony says, and checks his phone. 

“Pepper?” Steve asks, before he finishes off his hot dog in two big bites.

“Gotta pick up milk,” Tony says. “Now, I'm taking you to a place that sells _proper_ food.”

-

Steve has no idea what a person is meant to wear when being interviewed for TV. It's an entertainment channel, rather than a serious news thing, so he thinks he should probably wear something a least a little casual, but he's not exactly great at striking the smart/casual balance.

“Should I wear a tie?” he asks Darcy, turning to her as she pulls on a pair of tights.

She motions for him to come over to her. “We're not going to church, man,” she says and reaches up to unbutton the top couple of buttons of his shirt, then tugs the bottom loose from his pants a little. “That'll be fine.”

Pepper's terms with the show were that the interview would be held at Stark Tower, along with having final say about if and what parts of the interview will get aired, so Darcy and Steve arrive in the late morning while everything's being set up, and stay out of the way as Pepper directs proceedings from behind her Blackberry armour.

They retreat to one of Tony's 'dens', which is about the size of their apartment plus a little bit of Mrs Rossi's too, and find Bruce holed up in there, watching a reality TV show with a frown on his face.

“Hey, Bruce,” Steve says, and Bruce jumps, scrambling to switch the TV off as someone flips a table on the screen.

“Uh, hi,” he says, smiling sheepishly. “Darcy,” he adds, nodding to her.

“Banner,” she replies, and leans her forearms against the back of the couch. “I don't suppose you have any news you're wanting to tell us?”

“News?” he repeats, frowning. Darcy glances at Steve, and he raises his eyebrows at Bruce a little. “Oh,” Bruce mumbles, cheeks pinking. “No, I... Don't mention anything to Tony, okay?”

“Sure,” Darcy says, “but I'm going to find out what's going on with you and Jane one day, you know. I'm relentless, just ask Steve.”

“She is,” Steve says on cue, and Darcy smiles approvingly.

“Captain Rogers, Ms. Lewis, they are ready for you,” Jarvis says. Bruce looks relieved.

Pepper also saw to it that there would only be the one interviewer, with a couple of cameras on a fixed tripods, and no cameramen, so when they come back into the large living room, there's just one blonde lady there with her hands folded in her lap. She seems very young, which Steve wonders was maybe a conscious choice on Pepper's part to get someone young and inexperienced. 

The woman introduces herself as 'Megan' to Steve and Darcy, and seems more than a little anxious as they sit down by Tony and Pepper on the couch.

“Okay...” she murmurs, flicking through her notebook. “I'm sorry, I really did have everything prepared...”

“Megan, you're a star in the making, don't worry,” Tony says, and offers a glass of water to her from across the coffee table that separates them.

“Thank you, Mr Stark,” she says, and takes a sip of the water. 

“Call me Tony, Megan,” Tony says with a wink. Pepper rolls her eyes.

Megan clears her throat and looks at them for a moment over her notebook. “Okay, yeah, let's start with this. This one's for you, Captain... uh, Rogers.”

“Okay,” he says, and belatedly, “um, call me Steve.”

“Okay,” she says, smiling. “There seem to be a lot of rumours and misconceptions flying around about you at the moment.”

“Aren't there,” Steve mutters, and that trips her up for a second, which really wasn't his intent.

“Um, so these are just some true or false questions to maybe clear some of this stuff up, if you're okay with that.”

He shrugs. “Shoot.”

“Okay, number one: your birthday on July 4th was just marketing ploy by the army.”

“False, I really was born on Independence Day.”

“Steve bleeds patriotism,” Darcy says decisively.

Megan laughs a little. “Two: your parents were Irish immigrants.”

“True. Ma came over when she was fourteen and worked as a maid until she got into nursing, and my dad's family had emigrated when he was... ten, I think. He worked as a labourer before the Great War-- the First World War, I mean.”

“Three: you dated Rita Hayworth between her first and second marriages.”

He barks with laughter. “ _That's_ a new one. No, I did not date her, I never even met her. I didn't meet many celebrities, honestly.” He pauses, thinking about it for a second. “I did meet Gypsy Rose Lee once, though. She seemed really nice.”

“Wasn't she a stripper?” Tony pipes up.

“She was a burlesque performer,” he says.

“There's a difference?” Tony asks.

“Shush,” Pepper murmurs.

Megan looks between Tony and Steve for a moment, then consults her notebook again. “Okay, last one... Your wartime sidekick 'Bucky' was only fifteen years old.”

Steve takes a shallow breath. “False,” he says, and Darcy presses her hand into his.

“Let's move on,” she suggests cheerfully.

Megan asks Pepper a few questions next, about taking over Stark Industries, and her and Tony's long path towards a relationship, and Darcy holds on tight to Steve's hand for a little while. Dr Tanaka has been trying to work Steve through some of his feelings about Bucky, feelings that he'd put on lock down once he started dating Darcy. He _thought_ he'd come to terms with Bucky's death, but apparently he hasn't.

He rubs his thumbs across the back of her hand and tries to smile in a way that says, 'I'm not having a nervous breakdown right now'.

“Captain-- Steve--” Megan says, and Steve looks back up at her. “I have a few questions for you and Darcy.”

Steve takes a breath and smiles at Megan. “Sure.”

“Okay, well...” Megan checks her notes again and looks back at him. “There's been a lot of speculation about the... speed with which your relationship with Darcy progressed. Can you... shed some light on that?”

“Um...” Steve glances at Darcy. It'd probably be better if he just lets her take the reins with this. “What d'you wanna know?”

“Well... you and Darcy married, it seems, after only three months of dating--”

“Eight,” Darcy interrupts.

“Sorry?” Megan asks.

“It was eight months,” Darcy says, “we'd been dating for five months before you guys found out. Before anyone found out, actually.”

“Oh...” That seems to throw Megan for a moment, but she recovers. “Eight months is still a pretty short amount of time to go from a first date to marriage, though. Could you maybe... shine some light on that?”

Darcy shrugs. “It just sort of... all came together. We weren't planning on all of it happening so fast, but it just felt right.”

Megan nods. “So, Captain-- Steve-- how did you propose?”

Tony snorts; Steve guesses he remembers them having this conversation too. 

“I didn't,” he says.

Megan's eyebrows jump up a little. “You proposed to him, Darcy?” she asks.

“Yep,” Darcy says, flashing the ring to the camera for a moment. “We were watching TV and I basically just said, 'do you want to get married?', and he said, 'yeah', and then we did.” She waves her hands a little. “Ta-dah.”

Steve grins, bringing his hand to rest on her knee.

“You still go by your maiden name, don't you, Darcy?” Megan asks.

“Uh, yeah, I never changed it or anything. I haven't really thought about it that much.”

Megan looks at Steve. “How do you feel about her not taking your name?”

“Well...” He glances at Darcy, who arches an eyebrow at him. “I think that it'd be weird if we were both called 'Steve'.”

Everyone laughs and Darcy wraps her arm around his shoulders. “I taught him to be funny.”

“Seriously, he used to be _so_ dour,” Tony chips in.

“Thanks, guys...” Steve murmurs.

“Well, you don't seem to have any regrets,” Megan says.

“I have lots of regrets,” he says, “just not about Darcy.”

“Aw,” Darcy says lightly, squeezing him extra tight.

-

The interview is aired a week later, after some liberal editing overseen by Pepper, and everyone pretty much goes _nuts_ over it. News programmes pick it apart, it gets millions of hits on youtube within hours of being posted, and every newspaper and popular entertainment magazine worth its salt runs some kind of piece about it.

“I thought you were an absolute sweetheart on it,” Mrs Rossi pronounces while she's got him in her apartment putting together an Ikea chest of drawers that completely defies logic.

The most talked about article is one written by Christine Everhart of _Vanity Fair_ called _America's Superhero of Few Words?_ where she discusses that in an hour and a half of aired material, Steve only speaks for twenty minutes total. She's pretty obviously taking the position that Steve comes across as weak and young and naïve, but it's a big step up from what everyone's been saying about him recently, and he doesn't really have the energy to get worked up about it. Tony informs him that Everhart's 'a bitch, but she's okay'. Another magazine runs with it, suggesting that _Maybe He's Just Shy_.

“Man, I cannot get away from your ugly mug this week,” Sam says by way of greeting when Steve swings by his apartment.

Steve holds up a six pack of beer in front of his face.

“Oh, in that case,” Sam says.

It's a pretty hot day, the summer's shaping up to be a good one, so Sam takes him up onto the roof of the building, which overlooks some other buildings and a park, with East River in the distance.

“It's nice up here,” Steve says, looking out over the edge of the roof. That's the alley that Darcy got attacked in a couple of months ago. He takes a breath and steps back.

“Yep. Hey, here you go,” Sam says, handing him a can of beer. 

Steve turns around and catches sight of a big metal cage. “Somebody here keep pigeons?”

“Not pigeons,” Sam says, and whistles. There's a rustling of something, and then a great big bird flies over to them and settles on Sam's shoulder.

“Uh,” Steve says. “Is that an eagle?”

“He's a falcon,” Sam says, and grins when Steve raises his eyebrows. So that's what the name's about. “His name's Redwing.”

“Because he has red wings?” Steve asks. “Clever.”

“Whatever, not being creative isn't a crime, Cap.”

“Are you even allowed to own a falcon?”

“I don't 'own' him, we're just friends.”

“Oh, of course,” Steve says. Redwing seems to be eyeing him a little suspiciously. “I think I'll stick with dogs and cats.”

“You're missing out,” Sam says, directing him to a couple of folding chairs. Redwing seems happy to stay on Sam's shoulder for the ride. “Actually, this segues nicely into something I've been wanting to bring up. Ever been hand gliding?”

Steve doesn't see how that counts as a segue. “No.”

“I have. I love feeling like I can fly, like really _fly_ under my own steam.”

“Okay...”

“So, I've been thinking about adding some wings to my suit, really live up to the name.”

“You want to hand glide off... what, the tops of buildings?” He looks around, and suddenly has a bad feeling that Sam might have brought him up here for the kind of demonstration that'll end up on the evening news: 'Captain America involved in jumping death of local social worker'.

“I'm thinking about it. If I can be up high and get down to the ground again quickly, it'd make me a hell of a lot more stealthy.”

“No,” Steve says.

“No?”

“No, I'm not going to let you jump off buildings and end up as a pancake on the sidewalk. No.”

“I wasn't asking for permission.”

“Well, you sure won't get it from S.H.I.E.L.D.”

“I don't give a shit about S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Steve takes a sip of his beer. “They give a shit about you.”

Sam narrows his eyes and nods. “Uh huh. You know, you can be a real dick sometimes, I don't know how Darcy puts up with you twenty four seven.”

Steve chuckles a little. “I don't really argue with Darcy much, actually.”

“Good, see that you keep it that way,” he says. He drinks some of his beer and sighs. “Let's order pizza and try not to fall out for a couple of hours.”

-

“I think my problem is that I just don't know what to do with myself.”

Tanaka frowns. “How do you mean?”

“Well, I never wanted to be a superhero, I'm not Tony, I didn't choose to do it. But I wanted to serve my country and I was happy to. I just thought that after it was over, if I made it out alive, that maybe with this new body I could do something for myself at last.”

“What did you want to do after the war?”

He shrugs. “There was a woman who I was falling in love with – or thought I was falling in love with, anyway – and I thought we might get married and have some kids, and maybe I'd get a job illustrating advertisements or comic books... I don't know, I suppose even back then I didn't really know what I wanted to do.”

“Okay. Tell me about this other woman.”

He shifts in his seat. “Nothin' much to tell.”

“You were falling in love with her, Steve, there's something to tell.”

He looks at his feet. “I dunno, nothing ever happened between us.”

“Did you want something to happen?”

“I wanted to marry her,” he snaps, “sure I wanted something to happen.”

“Okay...” she says gently.

He scrubs a hand through his hair, and leans back against the couch. “I think I was in love with the idea of her, and maybe she was in love with the idea of me too. I dunno.”

“Do you think about her a lot?”

He shakes his head. “Try not to.”

“Why?”

“'cause... I'm married now, and Darcy isn't just some... untouchable image in my head. Not the way she leaves the bathroom.”

Tanaka chuckles a little. “Do you feel guilty for having loved someone before her?”

He lifts his shoulders. “Maybe? I mean, it's stupid, 'cause I know that Darcy doesn't have a problem with it, but I can't get that through my thick head.”

“You do that a lot, you know,” she says.

“What?”

“Insult yourself.”

“Oh.” He picks at his fingernails and pulls a face. “Yeah, Darcy tells me not to do that.”

“She's right, you know,” Tanaka says.

He grins. “She's always right.” He glances up at the clock on the wall above her head. “I think that's time,” he says, a couple of seconds before her timer beeps.

“I'll see you next Friday, Steve,” she says.

“Yeah, see you,” he says, grabbing his jacket and hustling out of the office.

-

It's a nice sunny afternoon when he gets out of Dr Tanaka's office, so he puts on his sunglasses and takes a walk towards Union Square. He's meeting Darcy later, once she gets off work, so he's got a few hours to kill. His sketchbook is in his bag, and he needs some inspiration for outdoor scenes for his comic.

He remembers that last summer walking through New York was a chore; everything was noisy and crowded and skyscrapers dominated the skyline everywhere he looked. He couldn't go more than a block without seeing the evidence of the Chitauris, destroyed buildings and stores forced to go out of business, both pro- and anti- Avengers graffiti on every other brick wall.

But the skyscrapers don't seem to bother him any more, and he remembers, now, that New York was _always_ noisy and crowded and _dirty_ , far dirtier then than it is now. Buildings are being rebuilt and new stores are opening up in the place of old and he guesses that nothing lasts forever, not even the bad stuff.

He gets a very involved looking taco from a truck in Union Square, and wanders along watching the street performers. Some of them are good, like the woman playing the violin (he doesn't recognise the tune, but then he doesn't know a lot about music; he tosses five dollars into her violin case), or the contortionist (he could probably do some of those moves...). Others aren't so good, like the crappy breakdancers (he doesn't know a lot about it, but he's seen enough breakdance in the last year to know that's not how it's done), or the magician who keeps messing up his tricks. He kind of feels like he's being watched, and when he looks behind himself, there's a guy with a cellphone half hidden in the palm of his hand. Steve rolls his eyes and looks back at the performers.

He stops in front of a mime as he finishes off the taco. He's always liked mimes – he loved Charlie Chaplin, and has always been partial to a little slapstick – and even this guy's 'help, I'm in a box' routine makes him chuckle. 

It's pretty noisy, with traffic in the distance and tourists everywhere, but he can still hear the whistle in the air. He doesn't even think about it, as his hands itch for his shield – he just throws himself at the mime, knocking the man to the ground, his own sunglasses skittering away – but not before the guy is caught in the shoulder by a bullet. Blood splatters across Steve's shirt and face, and people start screaming. 

He looks around, scanning the buildings across from them. The shot must have come from over there. “Down!” he yells at the crowd, most of who pay no attention and take off. Nearby traffic has come to a screeching halt, and he hears at least one collision. A couple of seconds pass, and no second shot is forthcoming, so he looks back at the mime. There's blood spilling out all over his white costume, and the guy has definitely broken the 'no talking' rule.

Steve pulls off his jacket, balls it up, and presses it to the wound. “What's your name?” he asks.

“Uh, uh, Brendan,” the guy mumbles. “Someone _shot_ me, man. What the fuck?”

“You're gonna be fine, Brendan,” he says, and glances up. “Ma'am?” he calls to a woman nearby.

“Y-yes?” she stammers.

“Can you come over here and keep pressure on the wound, please?”

“Uh... sure?” she says, half-crawling over to them.

Steve stands up and looks around. It's been almost a minute without another shot, and in his experience, shooters don't take this long, not even if they're reloading. There are a bunch of cop cars pulling up already, and he decides that it's safe enough to leave the crowd and go investigate that building.

“Excuse me, _excuse_ me,” a cop yells as he takes off at a run.

He ignores them and enters the building. It's a hotel, and he gets more than a few startled looks when he races in there and up to the front desk. “Has anyone suspicious come in or out of here in the last five minutes?” he asks.

“Sir...?” the guy at the desk says, eyeing the blood on his face.

“Someone's just been shot from one of your windows,” he says.

The guy's eyes widen. “You're Captain America, aren't you?”

“Where's the fire escape?” he asks.

“Over there,” the man murmurs, pointing across the foyer.

“Stay here, wait for the cops,” he says, and takes off for the stairs.

By his reckoning from the sound of the bullet, the shooter was on the fourth or maybe fifth floor, but he checks both, bangs on doors and gets more than a few angry or scared responses, checks all up and down the stairwell, goes up onto the roof and down into the alleyway behind the building, and there's nothing, not a trace. Whoever this was, was _fast_ , if not a very good shot, and he's more than likely in the wind by now.

He goes back outside, and the entire street has been blocked off now, with cop cars and black SUVs with tinted windows.

“Steve!” he hears Darcy shout; he can pick her voice out even with all the crackling police radios and people talking.

He turns around as she jogs up to him. “Darcy, what're you doing here?”

“Someone recognised you, S.H.I.E.L.D. monitors police radios... Are you okay?”

He touches the drying blood on his face. “It's not mine.”

“I know, you think I'd be this calm if I wasn't sure?” She puts her hands on his hips and draws him in. “Are you okay?” she repeats.

He smiles a little. “Yeah, I'm okay, I saved a guy's life. He is going to be okay, isn't he?”

“Yeah, it didn't hit anything important. He's probably going to have a couple of sucky months in physical therapy, but it could be worse.”

“Okay, good,” he murmurs. “Do you normally do field work?”

She gives him a hug. “Nope, but I heard you were involved, and nothing was stopping me from coming out here.”

He wraps his arms around her shoulders and kisses the top of her head.

The cops question him for a bit, clearly suspicious when he tells them he heard the bullet coming, but Sitwell comes over and 'advises' them to move past this line of questioning, and they finish up pretty quick. 

A guy who looks familiar comes over with his jacket, which looks all sad and crumpled and bloodied.

“Um, Captain,” the guy says, handing it to him.

“Oh, thanks,” he murmurs, looking at the poor thing. He loves this jacket. He looks up at the guy. “Weren't you on the helicarrier last May?” Steve's pretty sure he's the guy who was playing video games on one of the monitors.

“Oh, uh, yeah,” he mutters.

“Steve, this is Matthew, he's my deskmate at work,” Darcy says. “We got drunk once and slept together when I was first hired.”

Matthew looks like he's scared he's about to get killed. 

Steve smiles a little. “Well, it's nice to meet you, Matthew.”

“Yeah, you too...” he mutters.

Darcy takes Steve's hand. “Tell Sitwell that me and Steve are taking a car and going home, okay?” she asks Matthew, and doesn't wait for his reply before tugs Steve over to an SUV.

She hurries him into the car and gets in the driver's seat. “You sure you're all right?” she asks again as she starts the engine.

“Yeah...” he says, “can't say the same for my jacket though... Or my sunglasses...”

“Aw,” Darcy says, reaching over at patting his knee. “I'll get you a new pair of sunglasses.”


	2. Chapter 2

“What about these ones?” she asks, slipping a pair of sunglasses onto his face. She tried to get him to buy Terminator sunglasses, but he wasn't having it.

He looks at the little mirror on the side of the sunglasses rack. “These are like those glasses that that guy who didn't look like a teenager wore in that movie,” he says.

She reaches up and slides the sunglasses down the bridge of his nose. “ _The Breakfast Club_?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that a good thing?”

He shrugs. “Sure, I like 'em.”

She slides them off his face and folds them up. “Cool, and they're only twenty bucks.”

She pays the guy and shushes Steve when he fusses about it outside. She unfolds the arms of the sunglasses and puts them back on him, puts her own on too, and hooks her arm through his. “We're married, dude, come on. And that's a pretty bargain price for sunglasses that look like that.”

He grins. “I guess they're knock offs, huh?”

“Yup. You're lucky you can get them, I've gotta stick to my prescription sunglasses.” She taps her big movie starlet sunglasses. “That sets you back like, three hundred dollars a pair.”

Today, she has decreed, is a shopping day. They need a whole bunch of stuff for the apartment, and she needs some new clothes, and she's sure she can find something else for Steve to buy.

She grabs a bunch of cushions and a crazy looking vase from a homewares store, a new jacket for herself, and then hustles Steve into Century 21.

“You're buying yourself new clothes,” she tells him.

“I am?” he asks.

“Yes, go find something, I'll be over here.”

He goes off on his search with a goofy smile, and she browses the men's pants section. He should really get a new pair of jeans, she decides, and grabs a couple of pairs in his ridiculously waist size. There's a guy a couple of racks over totally checking her out, and she smirks to herself as she looks through another few pairs. Steve's birthday is coming up soon, and as always she has no idea what to get him, but she's pretty sure that she isn't going to find anything good enough in this store.

“Okay, I found something,” Steve says behind her. She looks up at her admirer, who seems to re-evaluating his life right before her eyes, then turns around and looks at what Steve found. “Is that a three pack of white t-shirts?” she asks.

“Yeah, I need some more t-shirts,” he says, looking at her a little mischievously. He _knows_ that's not what she meant.

She takes the pack from him and tucks it under her arm. “Fine. Go try these on.”

He looks at the jeans being shoved into his arms. “I have pants,” he says.

“You have khakis. You need more jeans that aren't mom jeans. Go on, get.”

Steve laughs and lets her push him over to the changing rooms. She stands outside the door, making the other guys feel awkward, and talks to Steve through the door.

“How's it going?”

“Um... the first pair don't fit,” he murmurs. “And... neither do the second.”

“Too big or too small?”

“Too big... Nothin' ever fits right.”

She grins. “Welcome to my world, buddy.”

She hears Steve chuckle a bit, and then the sounds of shuffling around and quiet muttering about how tiny the room is. After a couple of minutes of what sounds like quite a bit of frustration, Steve pipes up again.

“Oh, these ones fit,” he says.

“Yeah? Come out and show me.”

She steps back as he opens the door, and... _damn_. She didn't realise she'd picked up such slim fit jeans. His legs look even more ridiculous than normal, and it doesn't help that he's shed his shirt and is left with just one of his trademark tight white t-shirts. She pats the pack under her arm; maybe it wasn't such a bad idea that he picked them up.

“Do you like them?” she asks.

He turns to the side and looks at himself in the mirror. “Yeah, sure. Do you?”

“I definitely do,” she says, raising her eyebrows. She puts her hand on his shoulder and leans up. “Your ass looks amazing,” she says close to his ear.

She takes as a personal success that all he does with this information is glance at her and grin. “Okay, I'll get 'em,” he says.

They get food afterwards because it's basically impossible to go out with Steve for more than two hours and not end up eating something. Steve seems kind of unsettled the entire time, though, scanning the food court a couple of times as he picks at his fries.

“You okay?” she asks.

He twists his mouth. “Yeah... I just feel like... I dunno, I'm being watched? Maybe?”

“Well, we probably are being watched,” she says, and swipes his milkshake. Damn, she should have got chocolate too. “You know how exciting pictures of us shopping are to the internet.”

“I guess...” he murmurs, looking around one more time before settling back down. “Hey,” he says, and takes the milkshake back, “eat your own food.”

They go to an art store after, a big box store that she'd have thought he would hate, but he seems kind of amazed by how much stuff there is.

“You've never been in a place like this?”

He shakes his head, looking at a display of different types of coloured pencils in fancy boxes. “I just bought a pad, markers, and some pencils from the supermarket,” he says. 

“Get one,” she says, nodding at the display.

“Which one?”

“The nicest one.”

“It's really expensive,” he murmurs, staring at the wooden box with, like, a pencil for every shade of every colour ever.

“That's why you want it,” she says.

He screws up his face. “Yeah... Okay.”

He ends up buying a bunch of stuff, extra pads, ink, pencils, most picked up because of Darcy's gentle prodding. He's been really getting into drawing his comic, and she is totally invested in him continuing with it. In the last couple months, with the comic, and his therapist, and his friendship with Sam, he's seemed so much less anxious about life, and she'll spend any amount of money to keep things that way.

They take the subway back to Brooklyn Heights, and walk the rest of the way. When they're a couple of blocks from home, she stops him. 

“Wait here, I've got a surprise for you!” she says. He frowns at her, but waits as she turns the corner around hurries into the laundromat. It was kind of awkward explaining to the guy on the desk a couple of days ago that she wanted the jacket cleaned of _all this blood_ , but the guy seemed unfazed by the request, which kind of makes her wonder about their neighbours...

She pays the guy – and it seems exorbitant, but then maybe that's Steve's influence on her; the jacket _is_ as good as new – and takes it back out to him.

“Close your eyes,” she calls from around the corner.

“They're closed,” he calls back.

She peers around to make sure, then creeps up to him. She holds the jacket up. “Surprise!”

He opens his eyes, looks at it, and grins. “Hey, I wondered where it'd gone!”

“Well, I know how much you love this thing,” she says. He looks so goddamn happy that she has to lean up and give him a peck on the mouth. He bends at the waist and deepens the kiss for a moment before pulling back and taking the jacket from her.

“I'm gonna put it on right now,” he says.

“We're like five minutes from home,” she says as he puts the shopping bags down and starts pulling it on. He rolls his shoulders and tugs at the sleeves for a moment.

“I gotta wear it in again,” he says.

She hums speculatively. “Well, maybe you can wear it in bed tonight. Or... maybe I'll wear it instead.”

He bites his lip and grabs the bags again. “C'mon, let's get home.”

-

A few days later, Steve has to go speak at an elementary school. Well, 'has to' is maybe too strong, but the lady had asked him, and he'd tacitly agreed, and it looks _really_ bad for Captain America to renege on his promises. Darcy swings handler duty mostly because Steve just doesn't get on with anyone at S.H.I.E.L.D., and she was all like, 'hey, I'm his wife, isn't that a funny coincidence?' to Sitwell.

He brings his shield with him, and pretty much the whole school is assembled in the cramped gym. A gym full of pre-teens: it's not exactly Darcy's idea of a good time.

“Um, hi,” Steve says into the mike once all the kids have stopped clapping. Steve is kind of delightfully awkward with children. That was pretty much the first thing she noticed about him the day they met, before she'd even considered the idea that they might end up talking – he looked so buttoned up and mildly pained with all the kids, she felt and understood his pain totally.

Jesus, that was almost a year ago. Feels like so much longer. His birthday is still coming up and she's totally coming up empty on gift ideas. Tony is threatening to throw Steve a huge birthday party. 'Threatening' might not be the right word for it, though, because she's pretty sure that he's already hired caterers, but Pepper's given her permission to just not turn up if Steve isn't into the idea.

Steve talks for a while about being a superhero and being a kid in the twenties, and Darcy loves how his voice gets more and more 'New York' the longer he talks about his childhood. He gets distracted a couple of times, gaze drifting up to the windows on the opposite end of the room, but there's nothing there when Darcy looks and he gets back on track pretty easily.

Then there are questions, mostly about his shield and killing people.

“Will you throw your shield, it's really cool when you do that!” one kid says.

Steve screws up his face. “Uh, I'd have to pay for the damage I'll cause so, sorry, no.”

“What's your favourite animal?” another kid asks.

“Dogs, probably,” he says.

“Do you have a dog?”

He shakes his head. “Nah. I got a friend who has a falcon, though.”

The falcon story keeps them interested for a while, but man, this one kid is stuck on the dog thing. 

“ _Why_ don't you have a dog?” she asks.

“Um... Well, when I was younger I was allergic and poor, and now... I dunno, hadn't really thought about it that much, honestly.” He taps his fingers on the podium and looks back at Darcy. “Can we get a dog?” he asks.

She shrugs. “As long as you walk it.”

“We don't actually have to get a dog,” he says later, once they're leaving the school. There's a small gathering of press, and Steve just waves at them and leans into her.

She tucks her arm around his back and kisses his shoulder. “Hey, I like dogs, we can totally get a dog. Long as you feed it and walk it.”

“I think I can do that,” he says with a goofy smile.

-

She has a lunch date with Jane in the middle of the week. Jane's been avoiding her lately, and Darcy's pretty sure she knows why.

“So...” Darcy says as she slides into the seat across from Jane, an iced mocha in her hands. “Is Bruce a good kisser? He looks like a good kisser.”

Jane puts her head in her hands. “Oh God.”

“Not a good kisser, then?”

Jane groans.

“So, okay, you've had some casual sex with a cute, kind of dishevelled guy, is that really so bad?”

Jane drops her hands to the table and sighs. “The casual sex isn't a problem, no. That bit's pretty nice.”

Darcy raises her eyebrows. “How much casual sex have you had?”

“Um...” Jane chews on her lip for a second. “Maybe we've like... five, six times?”

Darcy's pretty impressed that Jane found five or six times to stop working. Then again, maybe the two of them kept working while they went at it; Bruce does seem like the slightly obsessive type. She smirks a little and takes a sip of her drink. “So, what _is_ the problem?”

“It's, um... it's the other stuff.”

“The 'other stuff'? What other stuff? Is Bruce not being nice to you? Because Steve will beat him up if I tell him to.”

Jane rolls her eyes. “ _No_ , of course not. No, we uh... Well, there was this lecture at the Hall of Science and we sort of... went together and then we had... dinner, I guess, and we didn't sleep together but he held my hand a bit on the walk back to the subway...”

“Oh, so you're dating?”

“No, we're...” Jane throws her hands up and sighs. “I don't know what we are.”

Darcy makes sympathetic noises as Jane mopes into her coffee, and looks around the little plaza they're in. It's hot and it's tourist time, so it's crowded all around them, but something feels... off. She feels like there's something just at the corner of eye, but every time she turns to look, all she sees is someone taking holiday snaps or drinking coffee or talking on their phone. Jesus, it's like she's turning into Steve, or something.

“Are you listening?” Jane says.

“Hm? Oh yeah, so more than fuck buddies, right?”

Jane sighs in disgust. “I need better friends.”

-

Work runs late. Like _late_ late. Some fool in Michigan is saying that he can control the weather and that if the president doesn't give him like a trillion dollars he's going to create a category five tornado, and it's totally bullshit, but S.H.I.E.L.D. can't ignore threats like that just because one of their lowly agents thinks it's a crock.

She gets out of the office at eleven thirty, and walks to the subway with Matthew. He takes a different line, though, and she's left on the train alone with her iPod and her phone for company. She puts one bud in and texts Steve to tell him she's coming home. The train clears out as it gets closer to Brooklyn, and by the time it's her stop, there are just a couple of people left, and only one other person from her car who gets off with her.

The station is just _creepy_ , but she's used to creepy, and it's never fazed her before. Brooklyn Heights is pretty safe neighbourhood, she tells herself that a lot; a lot more since she got attacked, and most of the time she does feel safe. Steve took her to work and picked her up for a few days after her suspension was over, but she slogged through all those appointments with the S.H.I.E.L.D. therapist and she got over it. All those guys are in prison now, and they're not getting out any time soon. She puts her iPod and phone away in her bag and walks down the length of the platform towards the exit.

There are footsteps echoing in step with hers as she gets about halfway to the exit. She glances over her shoulder, but there's no one behind her, and as soon as she stops, they stop too. She shakes her head and starts walking again. The footsteps follow her again, and her breath catches in her throat; she has a split second memory of that guy's arm around her throat before she pushes it away. She looks over her shoulder again as she keeps moving, and there's still no one there. Maybe she's being nuts and the echoing is from her own footsteps, but it sounds like it's further away than that, and this place is empty and creepy and she's starting to feel like the person in the horror movie who gets killed before the protagonist shows up. 

She feels like Drew Barrymore.

Fuck it, she decides, and pulls out her phone. She dials Steve, and he picks up after one ring.

“Hey, Darce, you okay?” 

“Um...” She glances around again and her heart kind of feels like it's crawling up her throat. She is _not_ okay. “Can you come meet me at the station? I'm a bit... freaked out.”

“I'm coming right now,” he says, and she can hears keys jingling in the background that attest to that promise.

“Okay, I'll be outside,” she says, “see you soon.”

“Yeah, I'm gonna be there really soon,” he promises before he says goodbye and hangs up.

She slips her phone back into her pocket and power walks to the exit, keeping her eyes dead ahead. She takes the steps two at a time and hurries out onto the street, where she feels a little safer, but it's pretty empty there, too, and she still feels that lingering sense that someone's behind her. She wraps her arms around herself, even though she isn't cold, and waits for Steve.

It's about a fifteen minute walk from their apartment to the station, but Steve makes it in about three on his bike, skidding to a halt next to her. She hates to do the damsel in distress schtick, but she is fucking _relieved_ to see him.

He pulls his helmet off and jumps off the bike. “Hey,” he says, reaching out to touch her arm. “Are you okay?”

She leans her weight against him and sighs. “Yeah, I just, I don't know, I felt like someone was following me...”

He hugs her tight and kisses her forehead. “You too?”

“Yeah...” She pulls back a little and looks up at him. “And earlier, too, it felt like someone was watching me...”

He nods, eyes flickering to the subway entrance. “I should go and check it out down there.”

“No, don't,” she says, resting her palms on his chest. “That never works out well in horror movies. Let's just go home, okay?”

He looks at the entrance for a second longer, then back down at her. “Okay, yeah, let's do that.”

Once she's got her helmet on and they're on the road and she's safely cuddled up behind him, she tells herself that maybe she's just being crazy. Maybe she got it into her head because of Steve on the weekend. 

She'd really like to think so, anyway.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a really long chapter, and most of them are probably going to be more around 4000 words, but there's no good places to split this, so, enjoy!

“I feel like I'm being watched,” he tells Tanaka.

“For how long?” she asks.

“Two, maybe three weeks?”

She nods. “You haven't mentioned this before.”

“It's only really got obvious in the last week, I guess,” he says. “Before that it was just a weird feeling every now and then.”

“Okay. Did this coincide with the shooting after our last session?”

He frowns. “I... I guess it did, yeah. Darcy's felt it too, though. I had to meet her at the subway a couple of days ago because she felt like someone was following her. Is paranoia contagious?”

She smiles a little. “I suppose it could be. What does this sensation of being watched feel like?”

“It's like... it's not all the time. I was out shopping with Darcy a couple of weekends ago, and I completely was not thinking about being watched, and then I just suddenly felt... I just felt like someone's eyes were on me, and not like people taking pictures of me, I'm used to that type of thing.” He shakes his head. “It's very unsettling.”

“It sounds like it would be. You have heightened senses, don't you?”

He frowns. “Yeah... Are you saying that I'm not imagining it?”

“I'm not saying either way, Steve, but despite my profession, everything isn't always in your head.”

“I guess...” he murmurs. He was kind of hoping that it was in his head, though, because S.H.I.E.L.D. apparently haven't been able to uncover any stalker, and if he _isn't_ imagining it, life is going to get kind of creepy.

-

On the weekend, Sam manages to guilt Steve into coming over and helping paint the community centre, which is in pretty bad shape. Steve thinks he's already done a pretty good deed by donating money to it, but Sam just shakes his head in disappointment as they wash up after training.

“How am I ever gonna learn how to be a superhero with you as a teacher?” he says, shaking his head.

Steve chucks a towel at him.

He somehow manages to convince Darcy to come with him, despite the fact that they have to be there by mid-morning on Sunday.

“I'm not sure why I have to involved in this,” Darcy grouses when they get up.

“'cause you love me?” he suggests, resting his chin on her shoulder.

She turns to him and scowls. “You are so manipulative sometimes,” she mutters as she crawls into his lap and pushes him down onto the pillows. He gets that feeling like air is being pulled out of his lungs that he gets whenever she manhandles him, and he flattens his arms against the mattress and decides that they can be a little late for Sam.

They do make it over there though, eventually, and pick up some cups of coffee in apology.

“I can't stay mad at you, Darcy,” Sam says, taking his caramel latte. He takes a sip and looks at Steve. “You, I'm not so sure about.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “Gimme a paintbrush.”

There's a lot of work to do, mostly scraping off old plaster and wallpaper. Steve accidentally snaps two knives from scraping too hard, and Sam shoos him away to paint the ceiling instead. It works out pretty well for Steve, though, because Sam has a step ladder and Steve can just sit on the top and paint with the roller on an extended handle.

“He did that on purpose,” Sam says to Darcy, glaring up at Steve.

“He is surprisingly sneaky,” Darcy comments, and flicks paint onto Steve's pant legs.

Steve laughs, they're crappy pants anyway. “I'm hungry,” he says.

“Already?” Sam says as Darcy roots around in his bag for an energy bar. “Weren't you eating a bagel when you got here?”

“Man, don't even ask,” Darcy says, passing the bar up to Steve.

“Thank you,” he calls.

They paint for a while longer while trading companionable insults – mostly between him and Sam, with some wisecracks from Darcy. Sam and Darcy get on pretty well, after she got over what she said was the weirdness of socialising with someone who has the same name as her dad. On his spot on the ladder, Steve has a great view of her profile as she laughs at something, her hair tied back in a loose knot on the top of her head, white paint smudged across her cheek. It'd be a perfect frame for his comic, and he tries his best to hold the image in his head.

The sound of something crashing through glass shakes him out of his reverie, and he jumps down off the ladder in one smooth movement, dropping the roller back into the paint tray. “What the hell was that?” he asks.

“I dunno, but that...” Sam points at the ladder and then Steve's feet, “was cool.”

“Thanks,” he says.

“No problem,” Sam says. “We'd better go investigate.”

Steve looks at Darcy as Sam heads for the door. She looks a little unsettled. “You wanna stay here while we check?”

“No, I don't want to stay here, doofus,” she says, reaching out and taking his hand. “C'mon.”

The three of them go down the narrow corridor and out to the reception area, and it isn't hard to tell what the source of the noise was: there's a brick on the floor surrounded by shards of glass.

“Uh huh,” Darcy murmurs, her fingers tightening around Steve's hand. “Does this happen often?”

Sam peers out of the broken window. “No... normally we just get our walls graffitied.”

“Pissed anyone off lately?” Steve asks.

“Always,” Sam says. “Shit, I'm gonna call the cops. Not that they'll be much use.” He looks at the glass on the floor. “Shit,” he repeats irritably and pulls out his cellphone.

“What kind of people are you hanging out with, Steve?” Darcy mutters, shaking her head.

He kisses her temple and goes off to search for a dust pan.

-

In the last couple of weeks of June, Darcy starts to get very shifty. Things get shoved under couches when he walks into the room, hushed phone calls get quickly cut off, and laptop lids get slammed shut. 

He grins to himself as they settle down to watch TV, Darcy's laptop purposefully turned away from him.

She looks at him with her eyebrow raised. “What are you smiling at?”

“Nothin',” he murmurs, opening his sketchbook. “What do you wanna watch?”

She leans over and kisses his cheek. “I don't mind, whatever.”

They flick through a bunch of stuff before settling on some English movie that he's only half paying attention to as he sketches out pictures of Darcy the way she looked when they were decorating the community centre. He doesn't really look up at the screen at all until he hears soft panting. He looks up over the top of his sketchbook and finds the two characters on screen having sex or at least getting pretty close to it. He glances at Darcy, but she isn't paying any attention at all, so he looks back at the screen. It's hardly an explicit scene, the actors are just pressed up against each other, panting and rutting a little, and Steve and Darcy did worse (or better...) things last night, but there's something... different about watching sex on TV than actually doing it yourself. Something kind of erotic.

He squirms a little and tries to go back to his drawing, but he feels kind of distracted and little bit hot under the collar. The actors are still panting and declaring their love for each other, and Steve can feel himself getting hard thinking about him and Darcy in that position, having to keep quiet like that and he knows he wouldn't be able to and... He tries to readjust himself, but it only makes things worse (better) and he can't help but groan softly.

“Steve?” Darcy says, looking over at him, and he knows that he's blushing up a storm. “Is this getting you going?”

“Um...” He licks his lips. “Yeah.”

She grins and raises her eyebrows, then puts her laptop carefully on the floor and reaches over to pull his sketchbook from his lap. “Nice,” she murmurs, eyeing his bulge for a moment before she covers it with her hand and squeezes.

“Ahhh,” he moans, rolling his hips up. She rubs at it for a little longer, and he knows that he's already starting to stain his pants from this. It reminds him of the night that they had sex for the first time, how he came in his pants, and it was so humiliating but felt so, _so_ good. He whimpers and rocks his hips.

Darcy laughs a little and slides her fingers up to undo his fly.

“Uhn,” he groans, “no.”

“No?” she repeats. “You don't want me to jerk you off?”

“No, yeah--” he stammers. “I want--” He rolls his hips again and gropes around to push her hand back against his dick.

Her fingers tighten a little, and he looks at her through half-lidded eyes. She smiles. “You want to come in your pants?”

He drops his head back against the couch and shuts his eyes, trying to keep his panting to a minimum, at least for the moment. The couch cushion shifts slightly and he can sense Darcy's face right next to his. “You want me to _make_ you come in your pants?” she asks quietly.

“ _Yes_ ,” he groans and keeps rocking his hips. He feels her breath on his cheek for a moment before she kisses his jaw gently.

The friction of her hand sends little sparks of pleasure down his legs as she picks up speed. He digs his fingers into the armrest and whimpers quietly until Darcy leans in again and says, “Louder.” She doesn't sound entirely confident in her order, but he still follows it without even thinking. 

He arches his back against the couch and opens his mouth wider and just moans, Darcy's words trumping any concerns he has about the neighbours hearing, and it's so good, it's so much better like this. It's nowhere near as intense as some of the other things they've done, but the loss of control is so sharp and sweet that he can't keep a single thought in his head.

He doesn't last long, it's kind of embarrassingly short, in fact, and he comes with a few strangled pants and weak thrashes. Darcy works him through it, slowing her pace as his groans turn quieter.

“Huh,” Darcy says, as he settles back down and opens his eyes, his vision swimming for a moment. “Is this going to be like a new thing for you?”

“Um...” He licks his lips and looks at her. “Maybe?”

“I can get down with that,” she says.

He chuckles and pushes himself up a little. “C'mere,” he says, tugging her in for a kiss.

“Ew, not in the wet patch!” she protests.

He grins against her cheek and sits up, winding his arms around her back and under her knees and scooping her up. “Shower,” he says.

-

_what do you want for your birthday old man?_ Tony texts him a couple of days before his birthday, while he's out grocery shopping. Darcy has banned Steve from opening her night stand's drawers, and it's kind of killing him to comply.

_what about a walker?_ comes a second later, and then a second after that, _when i realised i was two years away from thirty i CRIED FOR AN HOUR_

Steve laughs himself stupid for about a minute in the toiletries aisle because he can absolutely imagine Tony crying about getting older. He grabs a six pack of bar soap and tosses it in his basket, then texts back, _your friendship is enough_

His phone buzzes just a few seconds later. _fuck that i'm a terrible friend_

_It wasn't a compliment..._ he replies.

_just for that i'm not getting you ANYTHING_ , comes Tony's last message.

-

On July 3rd, Darcy takes him out to see a movie. It's a quiet little place that's still showing the _Great Gatsby_ , which Steve read as a kid, so he has a lot to say about it afterwards. They get sushi after, and then go home and have three rounds in the sack before Darcy tells him to go to sleep.

He tips his head back, splayed out on the mattress, sweating slightly. “It's only eleven,” he says.

“The earlier we go to bed, the earlier we wake up,” she says, curling up against his side.

“And what could there possibly be to wake up for tomorrow?” he murmurs, rolling onto his side so that they're nose to nose. He tangles their legs together and nuzzles against her.

“Nothing if you keep asking questions,” she mutters, and gives him one hard kiss. “Go to sleep.”

He wakes up alone in the morning, and grins into his pillow. He stays where he is for a couple of minutes and listens out for Darcy, who seems to be doing something with the pots and pans in the kitchen, before getting up and searching out a t-shirt and pair of pants, since he didn't bother to put anything on after they had sex last night.

He opens the door quietly and pokes his head out. There's a banner along the wall that says 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY' and a glittery wrapped gift on the couch underneath it.

“Darcy?” he calls.

“Shut your eyes!” she yells.

“Okay,” he says, dutifully closing his eyes. He hears some more clattering in the kitchen, and then her footsteps coming towards him.

“You can open them,” she says.

He opens them and looks at the plate in her hands and laughs. A giant pile of pancakes with dozens of flags stuck all of it. “Happy birthday,” she says, “I'm not singing.”

“How many flags are there in this thing?”

“Twenty eight, obviously, duh,” she says, pulling a face at him. “Ugh, this is getting heavy, I'm going to put it down.”

She sets it down on the coffee table, and turns back to him. “Seriously, though, happy birthday,” she says, and reaches up to kiss him. “I love you.”

He wraps his arms around her and squeezes gently. “I love you too... Can I open my present now?”

She laughs and presses a kiss to his collarbone before stepping back. “Knock yourself out.”

He sits down on the couch and picks the present up, feeling it carefully. It's soft and rectangular and pretty flat. He frowns and tears into it.

“It's a... shirt?” he says as he slips it free of the paper. He looks at the checked pattern. “It's... my shirt,” he says, looking at it a second longer before grinning. “It's the shirt I gave you last year on my birthday.”

“Yep,” she says, “I can be just a sentimental as you. I'm reclaiming it tomorrow, though.”

He grins and leans over to kiss her. She strokes her fingers through his hair for a moment before pulling back. 

“But my real present,” she says, reaching down under the couch, “is this.”

She drops a heavy, wrapped book into his lap. He arches an eyebrow and tears into this too, sliding his fingers over the exposed leather. At first he thinks that maybe it's a new sketchbook, but when he opens it to the first page, he gets what it really is: a photo album. 

“Oh,” he says softly, touching the first picture on the page, a blurry sepia-toned picture of a young woman. “This is my ma.”

“Yep,” Darcy says.

“And my dad,” he continues, scanning the pictures. He's never seen these pictures before – neither of them can be much more than seventeen in these pictures. “Where did you find these pictures?” he says as he turns the page. The second page jumps ahead about ten years, to pictures of him doing things that he has fuzzy memories of. In one he's playing with a toy train set, but he's pretty sure that wasn't his...

“It was a joint effort between me, Ellis Island archives, and Arnie and Michael. They send their love, by the way.”

“That was Arnie's train set,” he says.

“Yeah, I asked if they had any more pictures of you, and they searched through the attic or something and found a whole shit load of pictures that Arnie's mom had taken. Keep going.”

He glances up at her, feeling a little choked up, then back at the album. He flicks through a few more pages of childhood photos, a couple that look like official photographs from the orphanage (“It's amazing what you can find when you've access to the S.H.I.E.L.D. database,” Darcy says.), some from his days at Lehigh, and then some from afterwards. There are some group photos with the USO girls (God, he hasn't thought about them in years), some with the Commandos, and then a few with just Bucky and Peggy.

“I wasn't sure whether I should include them, but...” she says.

“No, it's... you should, it's perfect.”

“Keep going,” she says again.

He flips some more pages, until he gets to colour pictures that look like they're stills from footage or pictures from newspapers. One is of him and Tony on his birthday last year, and Steve looks kind of irritable and pissed off. He's come a hell of a way since then. There are also some of Darcy's favourite surveillance photos that S.H.I.E.L.D. took of them last year, some paparazzi shots, the picture she took of them kissing last Halloween, and a bunch of other random shots.

“Wow,” he murmurs, as he gets to the end, “you must have worked really had on this.”

“Well, it was kind of a last minute moment of inspiration, but yeah... I worked pretty hard on it.”

“God,” he says, staring at the last picture, one of him with his hands in front of his face that Darcy took when they were in bed, “I love you so much.”

She kisses his forehead. “I've got one more surprise for you.”

“Oh?” he says. He's not sure that he can take anything else right now if he wants to maintain his composure.

Darcy screws up her face. “I mean, it's not really _my_ surprise, but... Tony's planning a big birthday party for you tonight. He's invited, like, everyone you know.”

“So, about five people then?”

Darcy smiles. “Eight, not including you and me. He even invited Mrs Rossi.”

“Did she say yes?”

“She said nothing short of another stroke would stop her from going to a party at Stark Tower. But she also said that she wouldn't stay long, so that she wouldn't 'cramp the young people's style'.”

Steve snorts. “Well, it's gonna be interesting, at least.”

“We don't have to go, you know. Pepper said that she's already prepped for the fallout.”

“Nah, I think... I think I wanna go. Tony's my friend.” He pulls a face. “I guess. Ugh.”

Darcy laughs. “Okay, you'd better practice your surprised face, then, 'cause I wasn't supposed to tell you about it.”

“I punched Hitler over two hundred times,” he says, “I can act.”

Darcy rolls her eyes and bats at his shoulder. “Eat your pancakes before the syrup totally congeals.”

He bats her back. “Help me pull all the flags out, then.”

-

They go over to Arnie's around midday to say hello, and end up there for several hours having lunch and looking at other things that Michael found in their attic. They depart with a basket full of baked goods and get back home in the late afternoon.

They leave for Tony's pretty soon after that, and Steve spends the trip over preparing himself for spending an evening with Tony and everyone else. Parties have never really been his thing, and especially not recently, but it's nice to be thought of, and cared for, and Darcy's with him, so he can deal with it.

When they get up to Tony's private floor of the tower, he can hear them moving around on the other side of the elevator doors just before they slide open.

“Surprise!” everyone yells, and Steve plasters a grin on his face and jumps a little. There's a long, fancy banner along the wall that says, 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CAP'. 

Darcy huffs. “Ugh, it's nicer than the one I bought.”

“I prefer yours,” he murmurs as he says hello to everyone.

Thankfully, Tony did control himself and only invited people that Steve actually likes, like Clint and Natasha and Colonel Rhodes. Bruce and Jane are both there, too, of course, keeping a significant distance between each other that looks extremely awkward, but maybe only to Steve and Darcy. Darcy smirks at Jane, and Jane glares back before kissing Steve on the cheek.

“Happy birthday,” she says, and gives him a little box with a bow on it. Inside there's a very futuristic looking watch that has lots of different features. “It's from me and Bruce,” she says quietly, so that only he can hear.

“Wait, wait, open mine,” Tony says, shoving a couple of boxes at him. He taps the top one. “This one first.”

“Okay...” he mutters, opening up the first one. It's a long, plain box, and when he gives it a shake, it rattles. “I dread to think what's in here...”

“Just open it,” Tony says.

“Okay, okay,” he says, pulling the lid off. It's an action figure. Of him. “Uh _huh_ ,” he says. The face is very accurate, at least.

“Stark Industries has taken over production of Avengers toys, this is the first prototype,” Tony says. “I've made some upgrades to it, though. Push the star on his chest.”

Steve sighs and presses the star.

“ _Tony_ ,” the doll says irritably, in Steve's voice.

“Press it again,” Tony says.

Steve glances at Darcy, who seems to be struggling to not laugh, and presses the star again. 

“ _I'll ask Darcy_ ,” the doll says.

Steve narrows his eyes at Tony. “Did you _record_ me? I'm pretty sure that's illegal.”

“Not if it's funny,” Tony says. “Open the other one.”

Steve tears into the second, identically wrapped box, and opens it up.

“Oh my God,” Darcy says, peering inside. “It's me! It's a mini-me!” She pulls it out and compares it to the Steve doll. “Even the height difference is right!”

“Well, you come as a set, right?” Tony says.

Darcy taps her doll's face against Steve's and laughs. “Pretty much. Oh my God, I'm going to put these dolls in so many compromising positions.”

Steve gets more presents and a huge sheet cake with ninety five candles. Tony shrugs and says that he couldn't help himself, and Steve supposes that he has controlled himself pretty well so far, so he lets it go.

Mrs Rossi leaves after about an hour, with the parting comment that Steve has 'very nice friends', and he guesses that he does. He hasn't seen Clint and Natasha since he was in the hospital, and it's nice to talk to them under better circumstances. Sam hits it off pretty well with both of them, and Darcy says quietly that bird-identified superheroes have to stick together. Steve sniggers into his piece of cake.

It doesn't take long for everyone to get kind of drunk: Tony and Pepper get really affectionate with each other, Natasha gets giggly, Clint gets creepily quiet, and Sam is an incorrigible flirt. Darcy's just cheerful and loud as usual, and departs on a quest to irritate Jane (her words), leaving Steve with a steadily-getting-drunker Bruce.

“You good there, Bruce?” he asks.

“Hm?” Bruce hums, looking over at him. “Oh, yeah, I'm good. Um... happy birthday, by the way, if I didn't say it before.”

Steve smiles. “You did.”

“Oh...” Bruce taps his fingernails against his beer bottle before taking a sip. “You know, I didn't even celebrate my twenty eighth birthday.”

“Yeah?” Steve says.

Bruce nods. “Me and my girlfriend were working on studying the effects of gamma radiation on living tissue – my girlfriend was studying to be a biologist, so she knew way more about it than I did.”

Steve just nods, refraining from saying he knows who Bruce's ex is because Tony hacked his file once and showed them the pictures. That probably wouldn't go over so well.

“She said we should call it quits on the research for the night, but I didn't want to,” Bruce continues. “Thing was, she'd planned a surprise party kinda like this 'cept it was at this dive bar everyone used to hang out at. She invited all my friends and everything, and I wish I could say that I didn't know that she had anything planned, but she _told_ me and I _still_ wouldn't go, 'cause I was 'minutes' away from a breakthrough. That minute came three months later.”

Steve frowns a little at Bruce as he stares across the room at where Jane and Darcy are talking. “Are you sure you're okay?”

Bruce rolls his head towards Steve. “Uh? Oh yeah, yeah... Other people's happiness makes me miserable, I guess. And beer. I should stop drinking.”

Steve chuckles. “How's it going with Jane?”

“I dunno. I guess I'm kinda worried that Thor's gonna drop out of the sky and kill me. I mean, first Hulk beats him up, now I'm stealing his girlfriend...”

“I guess...” Steve says. “I don't think Thor's really got a say in what Jane does though.” Or who, a voice in his head adds.

“No, I know that,” Bruce says, and lifts his shoulders. “We just can't all be you and Darcy.”

“But what a world that would be, huh?” Steve says.

-

Darcy gets very snuggly when she's drunk, as if she isn't when she's sober, so much of the evening passes with her curled up on his lap, talking to people as they come and go. Steve rests his chin on her shoulder and participates a little in the conversation, but he's happy just to listen.

“This is awesome, I definitely made the right decision being friends with you guys,” Sam says, perched on the armrest. 

“Glad to help,” Steve says, twisting a strand of Darcy's hair between his fingers.

“Superhero networking!” Darcy says. “It could totally catch on.”

“Widow gave me her phone number,” Sam says, waving his phone at them. “I can now die a happy man.”

Darcy rolls her eyes. “She'd eat you for breakfast, man.” 

“I know, it's right there in the name,” Sam says, cocking an eyebrow. Steve laughs and readjusts his hold on Darcy, sinking back into the couch some more.

Tony throws himself over the back of the couch and grins at them. “Hey, birthday boy, aren't you going to participate in the revelry?”

“I'm revelling,” Steve says, “in my own way.”

“You've been sitting on this couch for an hour, ignoring the music and my fantastic dancing. Nothing about that be classed as 'revelry'.”

“He's having fun, Stark, leave him alone,” Darcy says.

Tony sighs and stands back up. “She's got you well trained,” he murmurs as he passes by.

Steve grins to himself and kisses Darcy's shoulder.

-

Despite Steve's lack of 'revelry', time still flies by, and before he knows it, it's past midnight.

“We should probably get going home...” he says, checking his new watch. Jane set it for him, and he doesn't think he's ever going to figure out how it works on his own.

“Ugh,” Darcy says, turning in his arms to press her face against his neck, “I don't wanna get on the subway now.”

“You can stay over,” Tony says. “Natasha and your friend Sam are.”

“Separately or together...?” Steve asks.

Tony shrugs. “Time will tell, I guess.”

“Your beds _are_ super soft...” Darcy muses, shifting in Steve's arms.

“How do you know?” Steve asks.

“I stayed over on New Year's Eve, when you, Tony, and Bruce were...”

“Getting beat up,” he finishes, “yeah, I remember.”

Darcy twists her mouth sympathetically. “But... I've gotta go to work tomorrow, and I can't exactly go wearing this,” she says, indicating to her floral dress.

“I can find you some clothes,” Pepper says, appearing at Tony's side.

“Uh, that's nice of you, but... anything that fits you isn't going to be much good for me.” She waves at her breasts and pulls a face.

Pepper smiles. “Oh ye of little faith, I'll find you something.”

“Hm...” Darcy hums. “What do you think, Steve?”

“I think you're gonna whine if we have to drag ourselves to the subway.”

“I don't 'whine',” she huffs. 

“Sure...” he murmurs.

Tony and Pepper seem to be rather amused by them, and Darcy narrows her eyes. “Fine, we'll stay,” she decides.

“Okay,” Pepper says, holding her arm out. “Walk this way.”

Darcy looks up at Steve and pouts. He rolls his eyes and gets a firmer grip on her before standing up.

“Got yourself a personal butler, Darcy?” Sam calls.

“Goodnight, Samuel,” she replies, looking over Steve's shoulder. “Jane, Bruce.”

Steve glances over his shoulder; Jane's cheeks have gone red, and Bruce is looking at the floor, but no one else seems to notice.

The bed is pretty comfy, and the room comes with its own bathroom and cabinets stocked up with toothbrushes, toothpaste, and several different kinds of shampoos and soaps. It makes Steve wonder exactly what Tony's been setting it up for.

They make out sloppily for a few minutes, and he manages to get her bra undone and push the straps of her dress off her shoulders while she messes around with his belt, shoving her hand into his boxes.

He grunts, rocking his hips into her hand.

“Oh,” she murmurs, “I didn't bring any condoms with me.”

“You didn't?” he groans.

“Well, now that surprise sex is a thing of the past for me, I don't really need to keep them on me. You got any?”

He shakes his head. “Never really thought about carrying them.”

“Then we have a problem,” she says, arching an eyebrow. She rolls off him and sits up. “Check the drawers.”

Somehow, there isn't a single condom anywhere in the room or the bathroom, and Steve checks pretty much everywhere. 

Darcy stretches out on the bed and yawns. “Go ask Bruce for one. Jane's sensible, she'd get him to wrap it up.”

Steve grimaces. “It's my birthday,” he complains, “why do I have to go?”

She pulls out her phone and squints at it. “It's one oh seven in the morning. Now it's just July 5th.”

He sighs and tidies his shirt and pants up. “Fine, _fine_ ,” he mutters as he leaves the room.

Jarvis gives him directions to Bruce's room, which is one floor up and several long corridors away. When he gets to the door, he can hear sheets rustling inside, and he considers just leaving, but then his only option is _Tony_ , and Bruce is clearly the better guy to go to in a situation like this. He grimaces to himself and knocks.

There are a couple of beats before Bruce calls out, “yeah?” hesitantly.

“Uh, it's Steve,” Steve replies, “can I, um, I need something...?”

“Oh, uh...” He hears sheets rustling again before Bruce says, “okay, come in.”

Steve opens the door, talking awkwardly as he steps through. “So, I just need, um-- oh.” He stops as he catches sight of the bed, or more accurately the sight of Jane with the sheets pulled up to her neck. She looks like she's trying to drown herself in bed linen. “Hi, Jane,” he mumbles.

“Hello, Steve,” she replies, cheeks flushing red again.

“Hi,” he repeats.

“So, Steve, what do you need?” Bruce says.

“Oh, well, I just need a... a...” He clears his throat. “Condom.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Bruce says, glancing at his night stand. “Yeah sure, let me just uh...” He leans over and sifts through a drawer. “Here we go. These are, um, regular sized. Are those okay for you?”

“Yep, yeah, those are fine, thanks,” Steve mumbles. Bruce tosses him a strip, and Steve catches them easily, then stands in the doorway not knowing what to do.

“Anything else, Steve?” Jane asks.

“Oh, no. No,” he mutters. “Okay, good night.”

“Night, Steve,” Bruce calls as Steve pulls the door closed. He can hear Bruce and Jane laughing softly.

When he gets back to his room, Darcy is fast asleep, spread eagle on the bed. He sighs, strips quickly, and climbs onto the bed, scooping her up and sliding her under the covers. He kisses her on the forehead and curls in around her.

“Night,” he whispers.

–

Pepper makes good on her promise of work clothes that fit Darcy, and after a huge breakfast that consists of at least fifty percent cake, they head out of the tower, Darcy to work and Steve back to Brooklyn.

“Hey, wait up!” Sam calls as they leave the tower. Steve looks around at Sam and Natasha and raises his eyebrows. 

“Hey,” he says, sharing a look with Darcy.

Sam catches up with him and claps him on the shoulder. “Good birthday?”

“Pretty good, yeah.”

“Hangover?” Darcy asks Natasha.

“Not after I raided Pepper's drug cabinet,” Natasha replies.

“ _Right_?” Darcy says, grinning. “She's probably breaking several laws, but shit is _good_.”

Darcy splits up with them after a couple of minutes to get to work, leaving him with Sam and Natasha.

“Where're you headed, Natasha?” Steve asks.

“Home,” she says.

“Where d'you live?”

“I've got a few places,” she says, and smiles.

He raises his eyebrows. “Okay...”

It's not even nine yet as they walk towards the subway, and everyone around them is rushing to get to their destination while the three of them chat aimlessly. Steve feels like he's watched again but it's already so crowded around him that he puts it down to paranoia. He knows Tanaka hasn't immediately put his feelings down to craziness, and he guesses that he appreciates that she respects him enough to take his concerns seriously, but he can dismiss simple paranoia – or try to, at least. He can't dismiss something... else.

Natasha looks around to where he was checking a minute earlier, and he touches her arm lightly. 

“Did you hear something?” he says quietly.

“Maybe,” she replies.

“You guys okay?” Sam asks.

“Just keep moving,” Steve says.

Sam's eyebrows go up. “Okay...”

They turn the corner onto a slightly less busy street, and Steve swears that there's someone behind them, and the more steps he takes, the more certain he becomes. Natasha's back has stiffened and she's clenching her hands to fists at her side. There aren't many options for them in their current situation, no cover that wouldn't get bystanders hurt, and he doesn't have anything on him but his keys and his wallet and a bag of presents. And he could do some damage with his keys if he needed to, but it'd get messy.

The street they're on is probably the least busy that they're going to get, and he doesn't want to draw this person out into a crowded area. He touches Natasha's wrist again and lifts his chin. She nods.

He stops and turns around, scanning the street behind them. Nothing seems immediately out of the ordinary, but there's movement in the corner of his eye, someone dressed in black, and unlike every other time he's felt this presence, this time the man moves towards him, weaving between people walking by so fluidly that they barely seem to notice that he's there. When Steve finally catches sight of the man's face, he realises that the bottom half is covered by a black mask, and his eyes are protected by some type of goggles. His near shoulder length brown hair is greasy and swept back from his face.

This does not look good.

Natasha inhales a little harder, probably only in a way that Steve can pick up on, but he does pick up on it. 

“Do you know who this is?” he asks.

She looks almost regretful. “Maybe.”

“This seems like a bad situation,” Sam murmurs.

“Probably,” Steve says.

The man comes to a stop in front of them, and because of his goggles, it's impossible to tell who he's looking at.

“Why have you been following me?” Steve asks.

The man tilts his head to Steve. “S dnyom rozhdenya, Steve,” the man says in a thick Russian accent. Steve glances at Natasha, who's rocked back about an inch.

He looks back at the man. He's a couple of inches shorter than Steve, his build and the way he holds himself familiar, and Steve knows without a doubt that this is the man that's been following him, and perhaps Darcy too. “Who are you?” he asks.

The man turns his head to Natasha. “Privet, lyubov’ moya, ty, okazyvaetsa, voshititel’no vyglyadish, kogda prilagaesh dlya etogo usiliya.”

“ _English_ ,” she snaps.

The man nods, lifting his hand to his mask, and Natasha stares ahead, unblinking. Steve's heart starts pounding in his chest. The man pulls the mask and goggles away from his face and smiles that winning smile of his and says, “You clean up good, doll,” in a perfect Brooklyn accent.

The only thing that stops Steve from throwing up is how utterly _frozen_ he is.

The man-- the... _Bucky_ takes a step forward and Natasha moves in front of Steve. “Don't,” she says.

“I feel like I'm missing something important here...” Sam says.

“How's the wife, Steve?” Bucky says.

“Where are your handlers?” Natasha asks.

“Killed 'em,” he says, then smiles. “Don't worry, no one's coming after you.” His eyes flick back to Steve. “Ain't you gonna say hello, Steve?”

Steve feels oddly separate from the situation, in a way that he hasn't since he first got out of the ice and everything felt like perhaps it wasn't really happening. Tanaka said that it sounded like 'depersonalisation', and he guesses he was lucky that it went away, but this is worse than it ever was before.

“Don't try anything,” Natasha warns.

Bucky smiles in a way that is so acutely familiar to Steve that he sucks in a sharp breath.

“Why, _Natalia_ , I'm turning myself in. Here--” He offers his wrists to her. “Lock me up.”

“Why now?”

There's a split second that Bucky looks at him and they seem to really _see_ each other, but it's gone as quickly as it came, and his face slides back into a sneer. 

“The man in my head wants to know who he is.”

Sam squeezes Steve's arm. “Are you, uh, are you okay?”

Steve looks at him, then back at Bucky. He fumbles to get his phone out of his pocket and shoves it at Sam. “Call S.H.I.E.L.D.,” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The movie Steve and Darcy watch is _Atonement_ , suggested to me by [roboticongraphy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/roboticonography).
> 
> Russian translations by the lovely [unjourimpossible](http://unjourimpossible.tumblr.com):  
> S dnyom rozhdenya, Steve - Happy birthday, Steve  
> Privet, lyubov’ moya, ty, okazyvaetsa, voshititel’no vyglyadish, kogda prilagaesh dlya etogo usiliya - Hi, my love, don’t you look gorgeous when you make an effort


	4. Chapter 4

She's reading through her second, poorly punctuated field report of the day when her phone starts vibrating in her pocket. She pulls it out and checks the call display: it's Steve, and he doesn't normally call her when she's working. Sometimes he texts her or messages her silly pictures, but she doesn't think that he's ever called her up.

“Hey,” she answers quietly, “what's up?”

“Uh, hey, Darcy,” Sam says.

“Sam? Why have you got Steve's phone? Is he okay? What's going on?”

Sam sighs. “Um... he is... okay. Sort of. We ran into someone a little while ago. Natasha says his name is 'James Barnes'.”

She frowns and looks at the phone for a moment. “Wait, what?”

“You should get down here,” he says. “We're at a S.H.I.E.L.D. holding facility in Hoboken. Steve... hasn't taken this well.”

“Yeah, I'm...” She scrambles to collect up her things from her desk, hands shaking a little. _James Barnes_? Is someone trying to fuck with Steve's head? “I'll be there as soon as possible.”

“Where are you going?” Matthew asks from the other side of their shared desk as she logs out of her computer and swings her bag over her shoulder.

“Tell the boss I'll be back later, or something,” she says, stuffing her phone in her pocket.

“Agent Lewis,” Sitwell calls from his office door.

“Gotta go, chief,” she says, “family emergency.”

He purses his lips. “I know. I'll take you, they won't let you into the facility without me.”

-

Rushing into the S.H.I.E.L.D facility feels uncomfortably similar to rushing to the hospital a few months ago. Sam flags her down when she gets in there, just like Tony did, though at least this time Steve is right there, not on an operating table with his abdomen held open by clamps.

Steve is hunched over on a bench, looking much smaller than he should. Sam pulls a face at her as she approaches. She reaches out and grips his hand for a second before sitting down next to Steve, noting how uneven his breathing is. “Steve...?” she says gently.

He grabs hold of her hand, Adam's apple bobbing as he swallows heavily.

“Shit, I've got to get to work,” Sam says. “Do you mind if I...?”

She glances up at him. “Yeah, of course, thanks for staying with him.”

“No problem. I'll, uh, I'll see you later, Steve.”

Steve grips Darcy's hand tighter, and murmurs, “Yeah.”

She waits until Sam has gone before speaking again, reaching out to turn Steve's face towards hers. “Okay,” she says, “have they told you anything?”

“No,” he says quietly.

She nods. She kind of hoped that she wouldn't have to be the one to try to explain what's going on, but maybe it's better coming from her. Sitwell filled her in on some of what's going on, way _way_ more than her clearance level allows her. She's always thought he was kind of a dick, but he's been okay to her today. She'd _never_ have got into this building without him, no matter how many names she dropped.

“Okay,” she repeats. “This is what Sitwell told me... James Barnes, or the person they think might be James Barnes, has been operating as a... Russian assassin. No one has ever captured him before, but there's been some footage of him over the years.”

“He hasn't aged,” Steve murmurs.

“Yeah,” she says. “He's been active since the late sixties, but S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn't know how he's still... young.”

“He's been following us,” Steve says. “I think he was the one following you in the subway.”

Darcy swallows. “We'll figure that out later,” she promises.

Steve looks up as they hear footsteps approach, and he gets up so fast that there's practically a comical outline of him suspended next to her for a moment. She rushes after him as he walks down the corridor after Fury. Shit. _Shit_ , no way this is going to end well.

“Steve,” she says, reaching out to lay a hand on his back.

Steve grabs hold of Fury's arm to stop him from walking away from them. “You knew Bucky was still alive,” he says, almost loud enough to be a shout.

“You're upset, Captain,” Fury says evenly, “but you need to let go of me.”

Steve's lip curls a little, but he lets go. Darcy grabs his hand and squeezes it.

“Thank you,” Fury says. Steve's hand tenses under Darcy's grip, and she's more than a little concerned that Fury's about to get his face bashed in by Steve. She'd rather not have Steve in S.H.I.E.L.D. prison along with everything else that's going on.

“Why did you keep it from me?” Steve asks tightly.

“I keep things from a lot of people, Captain,” Fury says. “Our intel was not one hundred percent on this, and we didn't want you going off half-cocked on a bad information. Which is what you would have done.”

Darcy grips Steve's hand harder. “I want to see him,” Steve says. “Now.”

“Fine. Come on.”

Bucky is being held in a reinforced room, handcuffed to the table, questioned by senior agents. Fury takes them into an adjacent room with a two way mirror, and as soon as they step in, Bucky turns and looks at the mirror, and shit if it isn't the creepiest goddamn thing she's seen in a while. It's definitely him, though, she looked at enough pictures of him while she was putting together the photo album to know his face.

“So, why did you decide to hand yourself in now?” the agent asks him.

Bucky looks back at him and smiles. “Well, I saw the Captain's lovely interview on the television, and I thought I should come visit.”

“Do you remember Captain Rogers?”

“You mean our nostalgia-filled early twentieth century childhood?” Bucky asks. Steve stiffens beside her, and Darcy wraps her arm around his waist. Bucky shakes his head. “No. But I remember knowing who I was.”

“And who were you?”

“Sergeant James Buchanan 'Bucky' Barnes of the 107th, born August 8th, 1919, Flatbush, Brooklyn.”

“And who are you now?”

Bucky blinks slowly. “I'm the Winter Soldier.” He widens his eyes a little. “I'm an assassin and a terrorist.”

“Do you feel any remorse for that?”

“No,” Bucky says, eyes downcast. “But I... wish that I did.” 

Darcy honestly can't tell what's sincerity and what's manipulation with this guy.

“I want to talk to him,” Steve says suddenly. “Right now.”

“Is that really a good idea?” Darcy asks.

He looks at her, lines around his eyes from how much he's tensing up his face. “I have to talk to him, Darce,” he murmurs, taking a shaky breath.

“Okay,” she says, rubbing a hand along his back.

“Come on then, Captain,” Fury says, motioning him to the door. 

Darcy follows, but Steve stops her. “Stay here,” he says.

“I'd rather not,” she says.

“Please?” he says, catching one of her hands and squeezing it.

She sighs. “Okay. But I'm going to be right here, watching.”

“Thank you.” He kisses her forehead and leaves with Fury. 

Darcy turns back to the mirror and leans her hands on the slight ledge, letting out a long breath. Fury steps into the room and dismisses the agent, and a moment later Steve follows. It hurts to see the scared and hopeful look on his face as he looks at Bucky.

“Captain America,” Bucky says, and smiles with his teeth.

Steve flinches a little. “Do you really not remember anything about... yourself?”

Bucky blinks slowly, one, two, three times. Everything about him seems to be designed to throw people off balance. “I remember that I wasn't always... what I am now. But nothing more.”

“Why don't you remember?”

“Great question, Cap,” he says. “I guess we'll find out.”

“Where have you been? Why haven't you aged?”

“I've been all over,” Bucky says, “and when they don't need me any more, they just put me back in my box.”

“How long have you been... out of your box?”

“A few months. Longer than I should have.”

“And when did you kill your handlers?”

“Oh...” Bucky says, and taps his fingers on his chin. “Maybe... two months ago? They let me out because I was supposed to kill you.”

Darcy leans closer to the mirror. This is a bad fucking scene for Steve to be in – she can just imagine what his counsellor would say about getting his head fucked with like this.

“But you didn't want to kill me?” Steve asks, with a heartbreakingly hopeful note to his voice.

Bucky tips his head to one side. “I'm supposed to kill you...” he repeats.

A second later everything goes nuts. Bucky lungs for Steve so fast that Darcy barely sees him move, the handcuffs have come free from the table as if they were fixed to it with tape. He's almost as fast as Steve himself, and maybe as strong. She darts out of the adjacent room as security rushes to Steve's aid, and slips in behind them.

Bucky has his fingers around Steve's throat, and by the looks of it, Steve can't get himself free. How strong is this guy?

“B-bucky,” he chokes out, trying to pry his fingers underneath Bucky's and drag them away. “Let g-go--” he manages, but Bucky's fingers only get tighter, cutting into his neck, digging into his jugular. Bucky's face is strangely blank as the guards level their guns at him. “N-no,” Steve says, waving them away. His eyes are starting to water, but God, he's still trying to protect his friend.

Darcy feels totally powerless to stop what's going on, and in the moment she wants nothing more than for the guards to shoot Bucky with extreme prejudice, but she can't even begin to imagine how that would affect Steve. She has her bag with her, hanging on one shoulder, and in between her panicked thoughts about Steve being killed, she remembers her taser, and plunges her hand into her bag to get it. Steve is facing her, Bucky's back to her, so he sees what she's planning and she reads the look he gives her as permission before she lifts the taser and shoots.

It barely seems to even register with Bucky, but it's just enough for him to loosen his grip on Steve. Steve shoves his arm away and ducks around him, grabbing Darcy around the middle and pulling her out of the room. More guards rush in, and she hears thumps and shouts for a moment before everything goes quiet. A couple of minutes later, security drags an unconscious Bucky from the room. Steve crumples against the wall.

“We're going home,” she decides, and Steve doesn't argue.

The drive home in a S.H.I.E.L.D. SUV is another one of those silent, miserable trips that they seem to have a lot of. She tries to engage him in conversation, but he's really not into it, and she thinks that maybe it's best that they don't get into everything while she's driving.

When they get back into the apartment, she decides that it's time to try and talk it out. 

“Steve, we need to...” she says, before trailing off.

“I don't even know where to start,” he murmurs.

“Yeah...” 

“They were all lying to me,” he says. “Fury, Coulson, Sitwell. God, what if Tony knew? He hacked all their files. How could he not? And _Natasha_...” His voice gets steadily louder as he keeps going. “He knew her. He _really_ knew her, and she knew all that time? She knew when I was at my most... _miserable_ , when I just wanted... It would have change _everything_ to know that I wasn't alone.”

She nods along with him, shelving some of the information for later (Natasha knows Bucky? What the fuck is that?). “I know,” she says, “I know. It's going to be okay.”

“It's not going to be okay!” Steve shouts. “Everything isn't gonna turn out fine!”

She raises her eyebrows at him and he squeezes his eyes shut, rubbing his palms over his face. “I'm sorry,” he murmurs, “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to shout at you, it's not your fault.”

“Sit down,” she says, curling her hand around his elbow.

He flops down on the couch and stares at the wall for moment, eyebrows furrowed. “What am I gonna do?” he says quietly.

“Nothing today,” she says, “there's nothing you can do. Tomorrow we'll go to S.H.I.E.L.D., and we'll hash it out with Fury.”

He nods. “He's my best friend, Darce, and he tried... And he's, he's a murderer and he was following us and...” His bottom lip starts shaking. “And he doesn't remember me. What am I gonna do if he doesn't... what if he never...?” His breathing gets jumpy, and he swallows heavily as he comes to a stop, fists clenching reflexively. He sucks in a high-pitched, shaky breath and presses his fingers to his mouth as he starts to shake. When she lays her hand on his back, the tears that were threatening to come roll down his cheeks. He hunches in on himself as he takes heaving sobs, and she's seen him close to tears a few times, but she's never _actually_ seen him cry.

She wraps her arms around him and pulls him in so that he's leaning against her chest, and he clutches at her, his body shuddering. She turns in to him a little, bringing her arms up higher and rubbing his back. She's never been too great with crying people, but Steve doesn't seem to need much more than to be held, and that she can do. It's been a long time coming, probably: he always stops himself just short of crying when he gets emotional, and he's got a lot to cry about.

She strokes her fingers through his hair and he presses his face against her neck as his breathing starts to slowly even out again. She leans back a little and ducks her head to look at him.

“Better?” she says gently.

He takes a deep breath, lips twitching. “Yeah,” he murmurs, voice rough. “I haven't, huh... I haven't cried like that since Bucky... died.” He wipes his cheeks with the heels of his hands and looks up at her. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cry all over you...”

“Steve, shush,” she says, kissing his forehead. “Look, everything might not be fine, but you _are_ going to be okay.” She smooths her palm over his cheek. “Okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, and rests his forehead against hers. “Yeah, okay.” He takes her hand and grips it tight. “God, I couldn't do this without you, y'know.”

“Yeah, you could,” she says, “you just wouldn't get so many hugs.”

Despite what she said about not dealing with anything today, she knows that Steve's all about action in situations like these and he'll never settle if they don't at least try to do something. After calming him down for another few minutes, she pull out her laptop and he grabs his phone, getting up to pace the room as he calls Tony. Their conversation sounds like it's perilously close to turning into fight.

“How could you _not_ have known about this,” he growls down the phone as Darcy remotely logs into the S.H.I.E.L.D. intranet. “Don't you hack everything?”

The database rejects her password as Steve listens to Tony, face pinched. She frowns and types it one key at a time. Rejected.

“So how deep would they have buried it?” Steve asks Tony.

She looks up at him. “They've locked me out.”

“What?” he says, coming around the coffee table and looking at the screen. He puts Tony on speaker and sits down next to her. “S.H.I.E.L.D. have locked Darcy out.”

“Not surprised,” Tony says, “more surprised that they didn't do it earlier.”

“It's not like I even have high enough clearance to see anything important,” she says.

“Hey, Darcy. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s just covering their bases. Honestly, this shit is probably hard copy to stop people like us getting our hands on it.”

Steve puts the phone on the table and gets his determined look on his face. “Well, if they're gonna do it old-fashioned, I can too. I gotta get back down there.”

“Yup,” Tony says, then adds, “hang on. _Bruce_!”

“Yeah...?” she hears him call in the background. Guy's probably still hungover; he was pretty hammered last night.

“Long story short, Steve's old best friend from the forties has resurfaced alive and now he's an assassin, and you've got to go down there and throw your weight around little and flash your doctor-y creds. Also, you're on speaker phone with Steve and Darcy.”

“Um... okay,” Bruce says. “So... I'm not that kind of doctor...”

“As if that matters! Anyway, you're a timebomb, how rude are they going to be to you?”

“If you could do anything, Bruce, that'd be great,” Steve says.

“I mean...” She can almost hear Bruce scratching nervously at the back of his head. “I can try. How are you guys doing?”

Steve glances at Darcy and smiles tightly.

“We'll let you know when we know,” she says.

-

S.H.I.E.L.D. try their hardest to cock block them when they get back to the holding facility, but Steve just stares them down until they move out of the way. Darcy doesn't consider him to be a scary guy, but he can turn it on when he wants to, and her fellow agents scatter around them.

“You're back...” Fury says, eyeing them as they come towards him.

“Well, _someone_ locked me out of the S.H.I.E.L.D. network,” Darcy says.

“Really,” Fury says evenly.

“Yeah. I'm going to have to call IT, you know.”

“I'll get their number.” 

The muscles in Steve's jaw clench. “Where's Bucky?”

“He's been treated.”

“'Treated'?” she repeats. That sounds super shady. And she should know, she works for them. Or at least she's meant to. “What does 'treatment' entail?”

Fury sighs and eyeballs them both. “We think Barnes has been subject to extensive brainwashing for decades. We're trying to reverse it while preventing the World Security Council from raining all holy hell down on us. We've also discovered that he has some cybernetic implants in his left arm that account for how he was able to attack you with such ease, Captain.”

“Well,” she says, “that's... something.”

“I want to see him,” Steve says.

Fury shakes his head. “Not now. He's sedated, and he's staying that way for a while yet. You'll just get him agitated.”

He's not wrong, judging by Bucky's show of 'agitation' a few hours ago. Darcy presses her hand into Steve's and squeezes. “Maybe we should let him rest.” She doesn't want to add in front of Fury that Steve needs to rest as well, but he does. She wouldn't mind a breather herself.

Steve purses his lips. “Maybe,” he concedes. “Okay... okay, but I'm gonna come back here every damn day to get updates, so your guys better be ready for that.”

Fury blinks. Man, is he cool under pressure. “Captain, we're ready for anything.”


	5. Chapter 5

Steve makes good on his promise, going to the facility every day, probably bordering on harassing the doctors to find out what's going on. He knows there's no other way, though; S.H.I.E.L.D. will shut him out if given any chance. He doesn't sleep for a week, it seems like, and misses his appointment with Tanaka completely because he doesn't even realise it's Friday. He even forgets to eat sometimes until hunger pangs knock him for six.

He feels completely wrung out. He hasn't even been allowed in to see Bucky, though he can watch behind a two way mirror, and the whole thing keeps pulling him further and futher down. He hasn't even got his head around the idea that Bucky's _alive_ , and now he has to deal with seeing his face behind the glass, but not seeing _him_. When he gets home, he can't do much more than eat and crash out on the couch.

He wakes up with the TV playing softly in the background one night, sprawled out on the couch where he dropped hours earlier. He didn't realise he was so tired. 

Darcy is curled up against his side, asleep, and he tries not to jostle her as he searches for the remote to shut the TV off, but she stirs anyway.

“Hey,” he murmurs, brushing her hair away from her face as she stretches her arms. “I didn't mean to wake you, I'm sorry.”

“No worries, I probably shouldn't sleep on the couch anyway. It doesn't do anything good for my back. I'm not as young as I used to be.”

He chuckles and kisses the top of her head, and she runs her hand over his stomach, looking up at him.

“I'm glad you got some sleep,” she says, “you were starting to look pretty washed out. Are you feeling any better?”

He sighs. “I don't know how I feel. I think... it still hasn't gone in. Maybe if he wasn't... it would have, but I don't know this... person, y'know?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I mean, this is a little out of the realm of accepted reality, anyone would have a hard time with it.”

“My entire life seems to be outside of accepted reality,” he says.

“I know,” she says, “I'm sorry.”

He nods slowly. He really doesn't know how he'd cope without her, despite what she's said. “C'mon,” he says, “it's late, let's get to bed.”

He pushes himself up and slides the arm that isn't around Darcy's back under her knees to pick her up. She squeaks a little as he stands up, bringing her arms up around his neck.

“I love it when you carry me,” she says.

“I know,” he says, “that's why I do it.”

-

He reaches his breaking point a couple of days later. He's cancelled everything, told Dr Tanaka he'll be unavailable for an unspecified length of time, blown off illustration work he had, stopped training with Sam, all to spend his days at the holding facility and watch Bucky work with the S.H.I.E.L.D. doctors.

Sometimes he seems fairly normal; he smiles and flirts and behaves like the Lothario he always was, and it gives Steve some hope. Then Bucky's eyes harden, and Steve goes cold as he realises that this _isn't_ Bucky, not at all.

Today, Bruce is with him, doing his best to translate 'doctor' to 'high school graduate by the skin of his teeth'. Apparently Bucky – or James, or the 'Winter Soldier', or whatever Steve's meant to call him now – has repressed memories, or as close to it since his memories were repressed by external forces. The doctors are experimenting with medication, but Bucky is a unique case, to say the least.

And then there's the question of his arm – metal from fingers to shoulder. Tony managed to get hold of some of his medical records – somehow – and he said that Bucky's arm is about eighty percent cybernetics, with a very basic skeletal structure underneath. Honestly, he sounded kind of pissed that he hadn't created it. Bucky doesn't seem to feel any pain in it, and certainly it's much stronger than his other arm. It makes Steve sick to his stomach to think of what they – whoever they are – must have done to him. The things they must have put him through. He remembers getting Bucky off Zola's table in Italy, remembers that Bucky would never tell him about anything that had gone on there.

Today, Bucky is screaming. He's been screaming all day, according to the doctor, with little respite. 'He's regressing', they say.

Steve and Bruce watch from behind glass as Bucky yells endless streams of Russian at anyone who comes into the room. Bruce flinches as Bucky hurls a tray of food at the wall.

There's an interpreter there, too, attempting to note down what Bucky is saying, though most of it is nonsensical, apparently. He does shout for 'Natalia' a couple of times, and Steve wonders, with a burn of anger in his gut, where Natasha is. When they brought Bucky in, she disappeared minutes later, and he was too off balance to think about it then, but now he hasn't seen her in a couple of weeks, and he wants answers from _someone_. He deserves at least that. 

“I have to get out of here,” Steve says suddenly, looking at Bruce. Bruce raises his eyebrows at him, but Steve is already moving.

“Okay...?” Bruce calls after him.

Steve thanks God that he decided to drive over on his bike instead of taking the subway, because he could not cope with being stuck in a metal tube with dozens of people right now. He pushes the speed limit to get back to Brooklyn, wanting nothing more than to go to the gym and tear punching bags apart, but it's the early afternoon and he only has use of it after hours. Of course, what he _really_ wants is to curl up with Darcy and have her tell him that everything's going to be okay, but she's at work and he doesn't want her to feel as bad as he does right now.

He goes home and struggles with his keys, standing at his door trying to work out which one is his door key and which one is for his storage locker.

“For fuck's sake,” he mutters, and gives the door a kick. He has to restrain himself from giving it a second and third kick, because he knows that it won't last long against his frustration. He presses his forehead to the wood and sighs instead.

The door next to him opens. “Steve?” Mrs Rossi says, laying a hand on his arm. “Are you okay?”

He sighs again and pushes himself back. “I'm just having a bad day.”

“Come in and have a cup of tea,” she says, patting his arm.

“Oh, no, it's fine, I've gotta--”

“Come in, and have a cup of tea,” she repeats firmly.

Steve's never really liked tea, but she has cake, too, an awful lot of it, and Steve honestly just doesn't want to be alone right now.

“So, what's wrong?” she asks.

“I, uh...” He shakes his head. “I can't tell you, it's... classified.”

She purses her lips and nods. “I heard a bit of shouting last week, was that about the same thing?”

“Yeah... I'm sorry if I disturbed you, I was just upset...”

“No need to apologise, I've just never heard you raise your voice before.”

He nods, and swallows. “Well, about a minute later I burst into tears, so...” He breathes out, pulling at his fingers nervously. “Not my finest moment...”

“You know, I think men of our--” She pauses for a moment and smiles. “--our generation find it difficult to deal with emotions. My husband was terrible for it, he'd bottle everything up for weeks until he finally went out and got spectacularly drunk and stumbled in the next morning at the crack of dawn.”

He snorts. “I can't get drunk.”

They chat for a couple of hours; she tells him all about her late husband, her kids and grandkids, her various jobs over the years, all the while plying him with cakes and tea. When he leaves, he feels at least a little better, talking to someone who isn't involved in this whole mess, and he decides to tackle the apartment, which neither him nor Darcy have really been bothering to keep clean. He feels like he hasn't had a moment to stop and _see_ anything in the last two weeks. He hangs up clothes and throws away candy bar wrappers ( _how_ many Hershey's bars has he eaten?), washes dishes and tidies away the various wires for Darcy's laptop, and grabs his sketchbook and a pencil. 

He doesn't draw anything amazing, he feels blocked, his fingers stiff, but he manages to at least fall back on his trusty sketches of Darcy. By the time she gets home, he's filled two pages with doodles.

“Hey,” she says, “this place looks a little nicer.”

“Yeah, couldn't take it any more, had to tidy up.”

She nods. “Good, I thought we'd never get this place clean if you didn't crack and do it yourself.”

He laughs and gets up. “You're awful,” he says, drawing her into a hug.

“And you wouldn't have me any other way,” she murmurs, patting his chest.

“Nope,” he says, burying his nose in her hair for a moment, before pulling back slightly and kissing her, slanting his mouth over hers. They haven't even done this in a while, haven't got much beyond pecks on the mouth in the mornings and evenings, and it only takes a couple of minutes before they're down to their underwear and panting in unison.

“Bedroom,” Darcy says, grabbing his wrist to lead him, though he's right there with her.

They can hardly keep their hands off each other long enough for Darcy to find the rubbers and once they get going he can hardly believe that they went _two weeks_ without having sex. His body can definitely believe it though, and he's groaning as soon as she starts moving. He tries his level best to touch her all over, pushing himself up onto his elbows to kiss at her neck even as his head swims and his limbs buzz.

“Darcy,” he groans, squeezing his eyes shut, “ _Darcy_.”

She kisses him hard, sinking her teeth into his bottom lip and sucking until he whines, then shoves him back down onto the mattress. He opens his eyes and stares at her as she takes one of his hands and arranges his fingers on her clit, then covers his mouth with her palm and presses down. 

He moans, eyes near rolling back into his head as she picks up her pace. He rubs his fingers in time with her thrusts, though it gets harder to keep up the closer his orgasm gets, and Darcy runs her free hand up his chest and pinches his nipple. He jerks underneath her, grabbing hold of the headboard and scrunching his toes in the sheets as he comes. His vision whites out for a couple of seconds, and when he comes to again, Darcy has collapsed against his chest, her face shiny with sweat and inches from his.

She removes her hand from his mouth and kisses him.

“Hey,” he murmurs, pulling his hand from between their bodies, which earns him one last shiver, and stretches his arms over his head.

She leans her chin against his and smiles. “Hey. Feeling better?”

“Yeah,” he says, “I do. I, uh, I talked to Mrs Rossi earlier. It helped a little.”

She laughs. “Grandma made you feel better?”

He grins. “I guess so, yeah.” He squirms a little under her – he's still inside her, and the movement makes them both shudder.

“Round two in the shower?” she suggests.

-

He doesn't go back to the facility for a while. He just... can't take it. Bruce goes periodically, and Tony idiosyncratically says that he is, 'all up S.H.I.E.L.D.'s collective ass', and reluctantly Steve decides to rely on them to stop S.H.I.E.L.D. from spiriting Bucky away in the middle of the night.

Instead, he makes a new appointment with Dr Tanaka and is struck dumb for a few minutes as he struggles to work out where to begin. She listens quietly as he talks, only occasionally nodding, and he finds himself talking solidly for almost ten minutes before he gets to the day he talked to Mrs Rossi, leaving out the bit afterwards.

“Well,” she says when he's done. “This is certainly... a new sort of problem.”

He snorts. “To put it lightly.”

“You seem to be handling it pretty well, though,” she adds.

He lets out a bark of laughter. “Really? 'cause I feel like I'm losing my damn mind.”

“Well, look at it this way,” she says, “no one would take this easily. In fact, it would have been strange you hadn't had such a reaction to it. But you've talked to friends about it, allowed friends to help you, and expressed your grief about what was happening. That's dealing pretty well in my book.”

“Hadn't thought about it like that...” he murmurs.

“That's what you pay me for, Steve,” she says, and smiles.

-

It's Sunday morning when he gets the phone call from Bruce. He's in bed with Darcy, his face buried in her hair, his arms around her middle. He wakes on the first ring, and blindly throws his arm out to grab the phone off the night stand. He hits answer and puts it to his ear.

“Hello?” he says.

“Hey,” Bruce replies.

Darcy groans and pulls her pillow over her head. Steve rolls over onto his back and looks at the ceiling. “What's wrong? Is something wrong with Bucky?”

“No. He's... he's had a breakthrough.”

“A breakthrough?” Steve repeats, sitting up. Darcy pushes the pillow away and looks over at him. “What does that mean?”

“It means he remembers something and you should come down here.”

“Yeah, I'm...” He swings his legs out of bed and scans the floor for his pants. “I'll be there as soon as I can.”

“Steve?” Darcy says. “What's going on?”

He turns back to her, and she's sitting up in bed, her hair all messy and knotted. He takes a shaky breath and leans over to kiss her. “Bucky remembers something.”

They get there in the mid-morning, and everything seems a lot calmer at the facility than it has any time he's come before.

Bruce catches up with them as they walk towards where Bucky's being held. “Hey,” he says. “Steve, Darcy.”

Darcy raises her hand in wave.

“So, what's happened?” Steve asks.

“Well...” Bruce puts his hands in his pockets. “Bucky has recovered some memories.”

Steve swallows. “What memories?”

Bruce pulls a face. “A lot... Apparently they came back all of a sudden, but the thing is... He remembers who he is, but he also remembers what he did, before. Those are... difficult memories. They had to sedate him, and they're trying to figure out medication at the moment.”

Steve glances at Darcy and she reaches out and rubs his arm. He looks back at Bruce. “Can I see him?”

They let him in after a few minutes argument. Bucky is unconscious when he steps into the room, hooked up to a couple of IVs, and Steve stays by the door, looking at him. He looks so... so _small_ and sick, and Steve isn't used to seeing him like this. He wishes Darcy had come in with him, but he couldn't risk Bucky trying to hurt her. He's still trying to get his head around the fact that Bucky was following... was _frightening_ Darcy. He can't forget that, no matter how relieved he is to have Bucky back.

Bucky stirs in the bed, and Steve steps forward.

“Buck?” he says softly, and takes a couple of steps forward.

Bucky's metal fingers tighten around the bed sheets. “Steve?” he says, his voice broken and rough.

Steve comes up to his bedside and rests his hands on the mattress, his heart in his throat.

“Steve,” Bucky repeats, tipping his head to the side to look at Steve. It seems like a big effort for him. “I'm sorry... I hurt you, didn't I?” He's slurring his words a little; one of those bags is more sedative, Steve guesses.

“You didn't do anything.”

“I did...” he replies, drawing out the second word, before his eyes widen. “I wanted to kill you.”

Steve shrugs. “I'm used to it by now.”

Bucky laughs, high and strange. “Yeah,” he murmurs. He's fisting the fingers of his metal hand into the sheets compulsively, and doesn't seem to know he's doing it.

“Can I sit down?” Steve says, gesturing to the end of the bed. 

Bucky smiles vaguely. “Sure.”

Steve sits carefully, making sure not to disturb Bucky's blankets too much. He has nicer ones than Steve recalls having from his brief stays in the hospitals, not the normal thin scratchy stuff. He wonders who gave them to him.

“How are you feeling?”

“Psychotic,” Bucky says, still smiling. He points vaguely at the door. “The doc said I had a 'violent psychotic break'.”

“Okay.” It suddenly a little bit harder to breathe, and Steve grits his teeth, trying to smile as convincingly as possible. “How's it feel, being psychotic?”

Bucky lifts his shoulders. “It's not bad. The drugs are nice. Didn't have these back in the day, huh?”

“I guess not.”

Bucky squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them again, his vague gaze landing back on Steve.

Steve bites his lip. “Are you tired, do you want me to go?”

“I don't want to sleep,” Bucky says, though it's not really an answer. “Talk to me.”

He blinks heavily once more, then stares at Steve. Steve's never been a stunning conversationalist, especially not under pressure. “You look really stupid with long hair,” he says.

“It was fashionable in the seventies.”

“That's not a good thing, from what I've heard.”

“Maybe not.” Bucky's gaze wanders for a moment, his hand still clutching at the sheets. “What happened to your girl? The one... not the new one.”

“She died.”

“Sorry,” Bucky says, but he doesn't sound sorry, he doesn't sound like he's even really listening; Steve wonders how much he's actually processing right now. “Guess everyone's dead, now,” he murmurs.

“I killed one of them,” Bucky continues suddenly, and frowns. “Dum Dum. He was tracking me in the Ukraine, in... 1968. He wasn't my target, but he got my mask off.” His frowns deepens. “So, I had to kill him. He said, 'Steve wasn't the same after you died', but I didn't know who that was.”

That just about does it; the equilibrium that Steve's been struggling to maintain since he walked into the room fractures and crumbles, taking with it what's left of his already shallow breathing. He leans forward and he buries his face in his hands, forcing himself to breathe through his nose.

“Hey, I didn't mean to upset you,” Bucky says distantly. The sheets shift slightly, and Steve can hear Bucky blowing out a hard breath, but when he looks back up, Bucky's barely moved at all. “Don't cry like a dame,” he mutters.

Steve flinches. “Aren't you... Don't you--?”

“Care?” Bucky finishes for him. He looks down at his lap and sighs.

“Sorry,” Steve says, rubbing his hands over his face. “I'm sorry, that's not fair of me.”

“It's fair.” Bucky's voice catches, and he clears his throat. “I deserve worse. A lot worse.”

Steve risks resting his hands on Bucky's leg. “It wasn't you.”

“Doubt that mattered to Dum Dum,” Bucky mutters.

“He knew, he'd have known it wasn't you.”

Bucky smiles. “Thank God you haven't changed.”

“I've changed...” Steve murmurs.

“Sure you have,” Bucky says, his eyes a little brighter.

Steve chuckles, and holds up his left hand. “Got married, at least.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, looking at the rings. “She... I scared her. Didn't I?”

Steve swallows. “It was you in the subway, wasn't it?” At Bucky's nod, he adds, “Why'd you do it?”

Bucky shrugs. “I wanted-- _he_ wanted-- to see how she'd react.”

“And did... he shoot that guy in Union Square?” Bucky nods again. “Was the bullet meant for me?”

Bucky frowns, looking at his hands for a moment. “No... Wanted to see... how you'd react. If you were still... the same, still had the same reflexes. Which you did.”

Steve has no idea what to say to that, so he just nods. They're both quiet for a few minutes, until Bucky lifts his head.

“I really am sorry,” he says.

Steve takes a deep breath. “I know you are.”

The doctors usher him out a few minutes later, as Bucky's eyelids start drooping, and his head falls back against the pillow. Steve presses his fingers to Bucky's hand for a moment before going back out to the hallway and Darcy.

“How was it?” she asks, drawing him into a hug.

He rests his chin on the top of her head. “It was okay. He was... he wasn't the person I remember, but he was Bucky.”

She rubs a hand up and down his back. “I'm glad. You feel any better about things now?”

He kisses the side of her head. “I do, I feel a lot better.”

“Good,” she says, patting his chest. “Let's go get an early lunch and talk about it.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I'm tentatively setting the amount of chapters at ten, though this may change a little. The rate of chapters is also probably going to slow down after this, since I only have one more chapter written at this point. I probably shouldn't have posted what I had so quickly, but I'm an instant satisfaction kind of girl. Oops.

Bucky seems to keep making progress over the next couple of weeks, though Steve still doesn't want Darcy to meet him. He's scared that Bucky might try to hurt her, and it makes her really fucking sad that he has reason to feel like that. It's been a long, hard couple of months.

 _We're getting a drink tonight_ , Jane texts her decisively.

-

“I feel kind of bad leaving Steve alone,” Darcy says, sipping her beer.

Jane rolls her eyes. “He's not a puppy, he can be left alone for a few hours.”

Darcy's not actually so sure that Steve _isn't_ a puppy, but she lets that one go. “I just mean that he's had it pretty tough recently.”

Jane sighs. “I know, Bruce said, but he'll be fine for a couple of hours.”

“Well, he did say that he was going to go over to Sam's, so...”

Jane knocks her bottle into Darcy's. “There you go, problem solved.”

Darcy nods and arches an eyebrow at her. “So, _Bruce_ told you, huh?”

“Walked into that one,” Jane mutters.

-

“...and he does this thing with his tongue which is really nice...” Jane says sometime later, twirling the umbrella of a long finished cocktail between her fingers.

“Nope,” Darcy says, waving her bottle of beer at Jane, “nope, too much information, don't want to know that.”

Jane smirks triumphantly. “So even _you_ have a threshold for inappropriate behaviour.”

“Tongues are my limit,” she says. “Anyway, we need nachos.”

“Yes! With cheese!” Jane says, and scoots around to wave her arms at the bartender.

The problem with getting Jane drunk is that all of the filters in her head that stop her from being the world's most maladjusted nerd fall one by one, and she rambles on end about all the new research she's doing that Darcy doesn't understand a word of. The good thing about _Darcy_ getting drunk is that she has no problem zoning out of conversations, and since Jane doesn't need any encouragement to continue talking, the night goes swimmingly.

It's just after midnight when Jane says they should leave the bar, and she's quite insistent about it, despite how sleepy and totally not up for moving Darcy is.

The cooler air outside wakes her up a little, but not by much, and she yawns, stretching her arms over her head. “Ugh, I don't wanna get on the subway now,” she complains, “why don't I just sleep over at yours for the night? Steve won't mind.”

Jane looks at her, clearly appalled. “No way,” she says.

Darcy crosses her arms over her chest and pouts. “Why not?”

“Well, number one, you're an absolute pig to live with: you never hang anything up, you leave wet towels on the bathroom floor, you spray crumbs all over the place when you eat, and you _snore_. I don't know how Steve puts up with it.”

She shrugs. “He likes cleaning, and he thinks my snoring is cute. Anyway, he learnt to sleep in the middle of literal war zones, a little snoring isn't going to disturb him.”

Jane raises her eyebrows. “He _likes_ cleaning?”

“Sure. I mean, he does it without complaining, so... And he's really good at it, he even does those little hospital corner thingies on the bed.” She pauses and narrows her eyes. “And anyway, why should I do it? Fuck the patriarchy!”

Jane laughs. “No argument from me, you just can't fuck them from my apartment.”

“Mean,” Darcy murmurs, recrossing her arms. “So, what was the second point?”

“Second point?”

“You said, 'number one' before you listed my many shortcomings. Normally that means there's going to be a 'number two'.” She sniggers to herself at the end and Jane rolls her eyes.

“Well, 'number two' is that... um... I might not be totally...” She screws up her face. “Alone.”

“Booty call!” Darcy cries, punching the air. “You're finally doing all the things that you were meant to do in college!”

Jane huffs. “I'll have you know, I had a lot of casual sex in college.” A guy passing by them glances their way, and Jane sighs. “Look, get a cab home, snuggle with your ridiculously patient, handsome husband, and leave me to have some sex tonight.”

“Snuggling _does_ sound pretty nice right about how.” She taps her fingers against her chin before pointing at Jane. “Sold. But I'm going to need some non-sexual details tomorrow.”

Jane hails a cab and smiles at her. “Sure. Get in the cab.”

Darcy glares at her as she's hurried in. She totally isn't going to get any details tomorrow.

-

They move Bucky out of the holding facility and into a hospital in early August, and Darcy is pretty impressed that Fury was able to swing that because she's fairly sure that the scary faceless security council guys would rather disappear him in the middle of the night. She only finds out a couple of minutes before Sitwell and some agents from the office leave to move him, though, and she isn't entirely convinced that there won't be some kind of 'detour' on the way, so she quickly shoots Steve a text message and runs after them.

“Chief!” she calls as they get to the transport. “Room for a small one?”

“Agent Lewis,” he sighs. “You're not assigned to this detail, go back to your desk.”

She puts her hands on her hips and scans the agents he's picked. Matthew's there, and _really_ , he's taking Matthew? “Look, I did all my training, I've got my gun certification, and between you and me--” She leans in to him and lowers her voice. “Matthew is a terrible shot.”

Sitwell looks at her for a moment before sighing deeply. “Smith, give Lewis your gun and vest.”

Matthew hands over the gun and pulls his bullet proof vest off. She pulls her hair back into a knot and slips it on; it's a little big for her, but she can get it to pretty much fit after some fiddling with the straps. “Sorry, man,” she says, “looks like today just wasn't your day.”

“Are you kidding?” he says. “That guy's a psycho, I'm glad I'm not going.”

He's got a point, but she doesn't have time to think about that as she follows the rest of them into the transport. Steve texts back telling her to be careful and that he'll get to the S.H.I.E.L.D. hospital as soon as he can, and she chews on her lip the entire way there. Some of the other, older, agents smirk at her, and one of them asks her if she gets car sick as they go over a particularly rocky stretch of road.

“Shut up, Robinson,” Sitwell says. 

Robinson's mouth snaps shut. “Sorry, sir,” he mutters. 

Darcy smirks a little herself.

Bucky is brought out in shackles. She's never actually seen someone in shackles outside of movies – it seems kind of... cruel. He's dressed in loose grey sweats, and she's just glad that it's not a freaking orange jumpsuit.

Up close, his face looks drawn and his hair greasy; she wonders what kind of care they've been taking of him, but then she remembers Steve mentioning that Bucky doesn't seem to eat very much, and she wonders if his condition is self-imposed.

In the van, they cuff him to the bench opposite her, and he looks her up and down as the driver starts the vehicle up. She keeps her face blank, doesn't give in to the desire to smile, because she really doesn't know where this guy's head is at, and if Steve is legitimately freaked out by him, there's definitely cause for concern.

“You're Steve's girl,” he says, his voice rough, like it hasn't been used in a while.

Robinson looks her way. She lifts her chin. “I am,” she says.

“What's your name?” he asks.

“Darcy.”

“What kind of name is 'Darcy'?” he says.

She sighs. It's not like that question didn't come up about once a month when she was a kid. “It's my kind of name.”

He nods slowly. The van goes over a pothole and they all get jostled. “How old are you?”

“Twenty five. How old are you?”

For a moment, he looks confused; he looks down at his restrained hands and frowns. “Thirty one, I think,” he says eventually.

“I thought you were a year younger than Steve,” she says. She remembers him reciting his date of birth: 1919.

“I was, but... I was taken out of my box so many times...”

“Okay,” she murmurs. His eyes keep drifting to where her gun is holstered. She moves her arm to cover it, and he raises his eyes to her face again.

“Where am I going?”

“Didn't somebody already tell you?”

He shrugs. “Probably. My memory isn't so good.”

She nods. “You're going to a hospital in the Bronx. They're going to treat your... you.”

“Okay,” he says quietly, looking back at his hands.

The rest of the trip passes pretty much in silence, though he keeps looking at her gun holster, and she's not the only one to notice. It's making everyone in the transport very tense.

When they get to the hospital, the driver takes them into the underground parking, where it's fully secured and there's nowhere for him to run, if he was inclined to. Sitwell vetoes taking the elevator, because he doesn't want to Bucky in an enclosed space where, apparently, he might be able to gain the upper hand. If he can get the jump on six armed agents, then maybe she made a mistake bullying her way onto this detail.

It's too late for concerns like that, though, and she's doomed to climb six flights of steep fire escape stairs. She's definitely a lot more in shape since she started working out with Steve, but it still sucks balls.

Steve is waiting by Bucky's new room when they get there, and he jumps up as Sitwell directs them to take Bucky into the room. Darcy grabs Steve's hand as she passes him, tugging him into the room with them.

The room is pretty nice – the bed's a bit of an upgrade from what he had in the holding facility, there's a couch and a TV and pictures on the wall, and a pretty nice bathroom, from what she can see.

“So, this is a bughouse,” Bucky says. “I guess it could be worse.”

“It's not a bughouse,” Steve says, “it's a... it's a place to get better.”

“Uh huh,” Bucky murmurs, turning away from him.

Steve looks kind of desperate, and it breaks Darcy's heart. She grips his hand harder. “We'll let you get settled in,” she says, and tugs on Steve's hand. 

Steve looks at her and at the other agents and nods. “I'll come by tomorrow, Buck.”

“'kay,” Bucky mumbles, as one of the agents steps forward to unlock his shackles. Steve stares at the back of his head for a moment before swallowing and letting Darcy lead him out of the room.

“Five minutes,” Sitwell says to her, and motions for the other agents to come with him.

Darcy waits until they're out of earshot before taking Steve's other hand. “He's better off here than where he was before.”

“I know,” he says, rubbing his thumbs against the backs of her hands. “But it still looks like a prison. It makes me realise how lucky I was, even if it didn't feel that way at the time...”

She smiles up at him. “Look, I've got to get back to work. Why don't you go hang out with Sam, or Tony, or Bruce, and when I get home, we can get takeout and talk things over.”

He smiles. “Yeah, that sounds good. I'll feel better after I've had an argument with Tony.”

“That's the spirit!” Darcy says, and leans up to kiss him as Sitwell calls for her to join the rest of the class. She pats Steve's cheek. “I'll see you later.”

-

It's late August and it's _hot as balls_. One would think that a girl from California would have no problem with such annual occurrences, but one would be _wrong_. Even Steve's hair is looking a little flat. 

The coolest place in the apartment is their bedroom, because there are trees shading the window, so Darcy pulls all the blankets off the bed and flops down on her stomach to tap away at her laptop. Steve has a big ass fan going, which makes things a little better, but she still wishes they lived in Alaska.

“How did you survive all those years in Monterey?” he says, lying on his back beside her. He's down to a t-shirt and boxer shorts so _ha_ , it's not like he's so above it all.

“In the basement, miserably, like all the other goths. Sometimes I'd venture out really late at night when the temperature had gone down and go drink beer behind the 7/11 with whatever idiot I was dating at the time.”

Steve chuckles and rolls onto his side, reaching out to run his fingertips along her bare back. She successfully put underpants on, but even her least restrictive sports bra seemed a bridge too far today.

“Summers were terrible when I was a kid,” Steve says. “We didn't have any fans 'cause it cost too much to run them, and it used to get so _polluted_ in the city. Public baths were disgusting and the air got so thick and humid, my asthma went crazy. One of the boarding houses me and my Ma lived in once was like a damn hothouse. People got ill all the time in the summer. I got strep throat _three times_ one summer.”

She closes the lid of the laptop and looks at him. “So, you don't like summer very much either.”

He smiles. “Not really, no.”

She crosses her arms in front of herself and rests her head in them. Steve smiles softly at her and keeps trailing his fingers up and down her back. “I mean, it wasn't all bad, I guess,” he says. “School was out and there were carnivals and circuses and you could stay out later to see movies 'cause your parents wouldn't have to worry about you being out after dark.”

“Did people do that thing where they open up fire hydrants like in the movies?”

“Yeah, every summer. Then cops came and reamed everyone out. Not that that ever stopped anyone from doing it again soon as their backs were turned. I wasn't allowed to play in the water, though.”

“Aw,” she murmurs, “so did you just sit inside like me?”

“When I was a kid, yeah, but when I got older, it got easier to handle. Buck used to...” He pauses for second, brow furrowing for a moment, before he looks back at her. “He used to drag me all over the place. On dates and to bars and to Coney Island. He forced me on the Cyclone once, and I threw up everywhere.”

She snorts. “I remember you telling me that. So, how many double dates did you go on?”

“Oh, a bunch,” he says, “and either I was ignored or babied. But mostly ignored. I guess it didn't help that I used to say the stupidest things to women. One time I told a girl that my Ma had a dress just like hers, and then followed up that since she'd been dead for ten years, it _probably_ wasn't the same dress. Another time I told a girl that the lines she drew on the backs of her legs to look like stockings were crooked. I got slapped for staring at her ass...”

“Oh, Steve,” she says, and reaches out to ruffle his hair. He grins and kisses her shoulder. “You didn't say anything especially stupid when we first started dating.”

“Oh, I dunno,” he murmurs, sitting up to trail kisses along her shoulder blade. “I think you've just got a high tolerance for my stupidity. How about the time I mumbled something about not believing in sex before marriage? That was pretty stupid.”

“You believed it existed,” she says. “And anyway, you had your convictions.”

“Stupid convictions,” he says, pressing a kiss to the top of her spine. “'Cause it wasn't about gettin' a a piece of paper first, it was about...” He trails down to the middle of her back, pressing his mouth to the bottom of her ribcage. “...being with the right person. And a bit about being Catholic, I guess, but mostly it was about it being right, and I knew you were it for me after our second date.”

She turns her head so that she can see his side as he keeps moving down her spine. “Really?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I was so... miserable back then, and you stuck with me even though I know I bored the hell out of you. It meant a lot to me.”

“You didn't bore me,” she says. “You were just a little... sad.”

“I was a lot sad,” he murmurs against her hip, “and you helped me remember who I was. That I wasn't always sad or angry or confused.”

She smiles into her arm. “You want to do the same thing for Bucky, don't you? Make him remember himself?”

“Maybe not in _quite_ the same way,” he says, moving around to the dip of her waist, “but yeah.”

She hums in response, and lets her eyes slide closed as he continues kissing her back.

-

She wakes up with her face mashed in the mattress, the fan still going. Steve's left the room, and as she rolls onto her side and catches sight of the clock on the night stand, she guesses that's probably because she's been asleep for three hours.

“Ugh,” she mutters, rolling to her feet.

She pads out into the living room and looks around. He's not there, which pretty much only leaves the kitchen. She covers her breasts with her hands as she passes by the windows, and pokes her head around the kitchen door. She should have guessed: he's eating ice cream straight out of the tub.

“Hey,” she says.

He lowers the spoon and smiles, a bit of ice cream at the corner of his mouth. “Hey, good nap?”

“Pretty good, yeah,” she says, walking over to him, and wipes the ice cream away with her thumb. She licks her thumb as he watches with slightly lowered eyelashes, then takes the spoon out of his hand and digs it into the tub. “So, I've been thinking. Or at least I had a thought for two minutes before falling asleep earlier.” Steve chuckles and she eats the spoonful of ice cream. “So, the hospital is definitely a better place for Bucky to be at, and he's doing better, right?”

He nods, frowning slightly. Bucky's been in there for three weeks now, and from the sounds of it, the doctors have figured out medication that's working for him for the moment. He's still on total lockdown, though.

“Okay, but the thing is, he's never going to get out of there – or if he does, it won't be to anywhere better.” Steve frowns a little harder. She bites her lip before coming out with it. “Not unless maybe... he stays with us.”

“Here?” Steve asks, eyebrows shooting up.

“Yeah. I think S.H.I.E.L.D. might release him into your custody. If you make a big stink about it, anyway.”

Steve pouts thoughtfully. “Would that be... would you be okay with him living here? After... everything he's done?”

“Would you be?”

His gaze drifts for a moment. “I don't know. I think... I think he's gotta deserve a chance, and you're right that he isn't gonna get it in S.H.I.E.L.D. custody. But he scared you, and I can't ignore that.”

“He scared you too,” she says.

“Yeah... I don't think he's gonna do anything like that again, though.”

“We could just do a trial run,” she says. “Have him stay for a couple of days, see how it goes. We don't have to make any big decisions.”

“Okay...” he says slowly, then looks up at her. “Okay, yeah, yeah, I think that'd be really great.”

She grins, digs out another spoonful of ice cream and holds it up to his mouth. “Also, I'm going to need you to take off your t-shirt, and possibly your pants too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The back kissing scene at the end was inspired by [this](http://boombangbing.tumblr.com/post/49070006270/amanda-gayfried-london-2006) scene of Chris's in _London_. I've been meaning to work it into a fic for ages!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning: this chapter is from Bucky's POV, and he gets... kind of creepy.

James didn't really believe Steve when he said that he was going to get him released into his custody – and more than that, he didn't _want_ him to. He isn't a puppy in the window, or Steve in his orphanage, desperate to get rescued by a good Samaritan. He remembers how badly Steve wanted out of that orphanage when he was a teenager, how much he wanted a nice family to scoop him up and look after him. He remembers that.

Something burns in James's chest when he thinks about it.

But somehow, Steve does swing it, and James can't pretend like he doesn't hate being stuck in a hospital room with a guard outside day in day out, so he lets them shackle his hands and feet again, and shuffles out to a car.

Steve lives in a nice neighbourhood, a hell of a lot nicer than the streets of Flatbush they used to knock around on when they were kids. The road leading up to his building is leafy and quiet, and every stoop is clean and free of litter. As the car pulls up to the last building on the block, a lady walks past with a kid and dog in tow. James watches them pass through the darkened window.

“Okay, Barnes, out,” the driver says.

James looks at the agent sitting next to him in the back, and lifts his cuffed hands. “At least uncuff me, these nice people are gonna be my neighbours. Don't wanna give the wrong impression.”

The man looks at him for a moment, then sighs and pulls out a key.

A couple come out of the building as James gets out of the car, and he nods to them as they pass by. They look a little nervous, eyeing James and the car and the black-suited agents, but as they walk away, he hears the girl say to the guy, 'probably something to do with Steve'.

One of the agents goes up and rings the doorbell, while the other stays with James, hand resting on his concealed gun, just in case he wasn't clear on the fact that they're happy to shoot him point blank if he blinks too hard. 

It takes about five seconds for Steve to get to outer door and open it for them. He's practically vibrating with... excitement... anxiety. Something.

“Hi,” he says, and James guesses that the light hits him just right, because he looks even more blond and wholesome than James remembers. “Um... come in.”

He leads them down a short hallway to his apartment, where his girl-- Darcy (James is going to have to start remembering her name sometime, even if he does think it's a stupid one) is waiting by the door.

“Hey,” she says, and he nods to her.

“You can go, thanks,” Steve tells the agents, and follows James into the apartment, shutting the door behind them.

“So, this is our crib,” Darcy says, gesturing to the living room. James frowns at her and looks around. “Crib means, uh, place,” she says, “it's from a TV show...”

“I got it,” he says. Their living room is painted pale yellow, covered over with posters and drawings, and there's a long, comfortable-looking couch in front of a large television. There are a couple of tables, one with a bowl full of keys on top, and another in front of the couch, cluttered with books and pieces of paper. There's an equally cluttered bookcase across from the front door, and James sees some books that he recognises, and a lot that he doesn't.

“This is gonna be your room,” Steve says, leading him to a door. “It's not, uh, very big.”

“I slept in smaller,” James says, peering into the room. There's a small bed and a chest of drawers in there, and some more clutter in one corner. He's starting to sense a pattern.

“I remember,” Steve says with a smile. “Are you hungry? I can make you something.”

“I'm fine.” There's a long mirror on the wall by the door to 'his' bedroom, and when he catches sight of himself in it, he stops. God, he looks like shit.

“You okay?” Steve asks, putting his hand on James's shoulder.

James shifts away from him, and sighs. “Fine...” he murmurs, running his fingers through his hair. “Regretting this hairstyle.”

Steve chuckles a little. “Yeah... Want me to cut it for you?”

He raises his eyebrows at Steve.

“What?” Steve says. “I do an okay job on my own hair.”

“He trims mine too,” Darcy says. James turns to look at her, sitting on the armrest of the couch. He'd almost forgotten about her. She smiles at him, though the look in her eyes is shuttered. “I'm too lazy and cheap to go to the hairdresser, and Steve can cut a straight line like a champ.”

“C'mon, I'll get the clippers,” Steve says.

James doesn't really want Steve to touch him, but he doesn't have much choice if he wants to get rid of this ridiculous hairstyle, so he leans against the couch and dips his head forward as Steve runs the clippers over the back of his hair. He does a pretty good job with it, though it turns out looking almost exactly like his.

“I can only do it with the floppy bit,” Steve says, “sorry.”

“It's fine,” James murmurs, running his fingers through the now short hair on the back of his head. “It's better than before.”

They order in pizza for dinner, and Steve apparently gets his 'usual', which looks like it could probably feed all three of them for at least a couple of days. Him and Darcy set it up on the coffee table, and James frowns.

“Don't you got a real table?” he asks.

“Oh, I gave up on _that_ argument a long time ago,” Steve says.

“You can't eat takeout at a kitchen table, are you crazy?” Darcy says, then pauses. “Uh... sorry.”

“Let's just eat,” James mutters.

He's never seen Steve quite eat like _this_ before, not in the... fifteen years he knew him. He picks at the pepperoni on his pizza, and watches Steve shovel food into his mouth. Darcy gives Steve napkins every now and then, or wipes sauce from the corner of his mouth with her fingertips.

“What?” Steve says, catching him looking.

“I don't remember you eating this much...” he says. “Before.”

Steve takes another napkin from Darcy's outstretched fingers, smiling into it as he wipes his mouth. “Well, there wasn't a lot of food for me to eat, back then. I could've eaten all the commandos' rations and still been hungry.”

“Why didn't you say anything?”

Steve shrugs. “Wouldn't've done any good, we couldn't change how much food the army gave us.”

“Well, maybe we could have,” James murmurs.

Steve smiles. “Not like it matters now though, huh?”

“I guess not,” he says, and goes back to picking at his pizza.

He goes to bed early, leaving Steve and Darcy on the couch watching some awful movie. Steve fusses over him, asks if there's something wrong, but James just mumbles something about wanting to get a proper night's sleep, and Steve agrees that it's hard to sleep in hospital beds, and the whole conversation is so horribly bland that James only barely stops himself from saying something really mean just to spice things up.

He doesn't really sleep, though. The bed is definitely a lot more comfortable than the one at the hospital, but every sound wakes him up. Cars outside, people upstairs flushing toilets, Steve and Darcy laughing and, he's pretty sure, having sex. He gets a few fitful hours, then lies in bed and stares at the ceiling until it starts to get light out.

He hears movement out in the living room at six, and gets up to open his door a sliver and peek out. Darcy's standing near the couch, stretching her arms over her head, giving him a profile view of her. Her breasts press against the white cotton of a t-shirt that is obviously not hers, and he knows that he shouldn't be staring at the tits of his best friend's girl, but he does. They're big and kind of saggy, and he can see her nipples through the stretched material of the t-shirt.

Steve comes up behind her, shirtless, and wraps his arms around her. “Gimme my t-shirt back,” he says into her hair.

“Nope,” she says, tipping her head back onto his shoulder to kiss him. “Legally, half of everything you own is mine,” she murmurs.

“Then you can have half the t-shirt.”

She turns around in the circle of Steve's arms, her breasts flattening against Steve's chest. James imagines them to be very soft.

“Which half?” she asks.

Steve purses his lips thoughtfully. “The right half.”

“Your right or my right?”

“Yours,” he says, and ducks down to kiss her again.

They stay like that for a while, trading soft kisses, and James should look away, but he doesn't. Steve's hand wanders down her side and closes around the bottom of the t-shirt, pulling it up a couple of inches to reveal the grey waistband of her underwear. They stop after a couple of minutes, though, and the hem of the t-shirt falls back down to cover her thigh.

“What are you going to do with Bucky today?” she asks.

“I dunno,” he says, “I think probably stay in. I don't wanna... it's overwhelming, at first, y'know?”

She lays her hands flat on his chest. “I can imagine.”

Steve nods, smoothing his palms down her back. “What d'you want for breakfast?”

“Hm... We got any grapefruit left?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“That and some yoghurt, please?”

He smiles and kisses her forehead. “All right, go wash up.”

James steps away from the door as they separate, and goes back to lie on the bed. He's not sure when he'll get the courage to leave the bedroom, but he knows that he wants her to be gone before he does.

He eventually comes out at nine thirty, and Steve immediately jumps up from where he was sitting and stands there awkwardly, with the couch between them.

“Hey,” Steve says after a moment.

James nods. “Hi. Where's the wife?”

“She went to work a couple of hours ago... D'you want breakfast? Toast? Cereal? We've got some fruit...”

“Cereal,” James says.

“Okay, I'll, uh...” Steve mutters, moving towards the kitchen.

“I can get it, I'm not an invalid,” James snaps, and feels a twinge of regret as Steve's brow furrows a little. “Sorry. I can get it. Don't worry about me.”

Steve smiles a little. “Okay. I'm just gonna be... drawing.”

“'kay,” James says, walking over to the kitchen as Steve sits back down.

He lingers over the cereal as long as he can, while Steve keeps shooting glances at him over the edge of his sketchbook, but by ten fifteen they're back to an untempered, uncomfortable silence.

“Do you wanna watch TV?” Steve asks.

“I want to go out.”

“Out?” Steve repeats, eyebrows climbing a little. “Where d'you want to go?”

“Anywhere, just not here.”

“Okay...” he says. “Well, I guess I gotta do some grocery shopping? We could do that...”

He stands up. “Let's go.”

They only get a couple of steps away from Steve's front door when the door next to it opens, and a little old lady peers out.

“Hey, Mrs Rossi,” Steve says, stopping to chat. James clenches his fists behind his back and keeps his face blank.

“Hello, sweetheart,” she replies, reaching out to pat his arm. “How are you feeling?”

Steve grins. “I'm really good today, thanks.”

“That's nice. And who's your friend?” she asks.

“Oh, this is B--”

“James,” James says, holding out his hand.

“Well, it's nice to meet you, James,” she says, shaking his hand surprisingly firmly.

“And what's your name, doll?”

“'Doll'?” she repeats, and laughs. “It's been a long time since anyone's called me that. My name's Sophia.”

James kisses her hand. “Great to meet you, Sophia.”

Sophia chuckles a little and takes a deep breath. “Oh dear, Steve, what sort of people do you hang around with?”

“I dunno,” Steve says, arching an eyebrow at James. “I didn't know your name was Sophia,” he adds.

“Well, you never asked,” she says. “Where are you two boys off to?”

“Just grocery shopping. You want me to pick you up anything?”

“Well, if you're asking...” She disappears for a moment, and comes back with a piece of lined paper that she hands Steve. From what James can see, there are about fifteen items on the list. “Only if it's not too much bother...” she says. Old lady's got game.

“Sure,” Steve says, scanning it quickly.

“I'll give you the money for it when you get back. You really are a dear.”

“Sure,” he says again, smirking a little. “C'mon, Bu-- James, we'd better get going.” 

“Getting bullied by an old lady, Steve?” James murmurs as they walk away.

“Flirting with an old lady, _James_?” he shoots back, grinning.

-

Grocery stores are definitely different these days. There are a good dozen long aisles stretching across the store, and James's not sure how anyone's supposed to find anything, but Steve just grabs a cart and starts moving.

“So, what do you need to get?” James asks, trying to fall into step with him. He forgot how long Steve's stride got after the serum.

“Dish soap, peanut butter, milk, ice cream, cheese, bread, and shampoo,” Steve rattles off. “Plus everything Mrs Rossi wants. Oh, and Darcy needs some more razors.”

Steve seems to know exactly where everything is, and every time he stops somewhere he ends up getting about three extra things before moving on. He tells James to pick up whatever he wants, but the choice is confusing and everything looks disgusting and every time someone comes up to Steve, James feels himself freeze up.

“Hey, man!” someone calls to Steve as he's looking at different kinds of shampoos. James wants to knock them out of his hand and tell him to stop being such a girl, but he bites his tongue.

Steve looks over his shoulder and waves at the guy as he passes, then goes back to the shampoo.

“Who was that?” James asks tightly.

“One of the guys who works at the Starbucks down the street.”

“Starbucks?”

Steve looks up at him. “It's a coffee shop.” He puts a couple of bottles of shampoo in the cart and moves down the aisle.

“We done yet?” James asks.

“Just gotta get Darcy's razors...” Steve says, scanning the shelf.

James grabs a packet and tosses them in the cart. “There you go, done.”

“Uh...” Steve checks the cart and shakes his head. “She doesn't like the cheap ones, she cuts her legs on them. Cutting your leg with a razor _hurts_.”

“How would you know?” James asks as Steve hunts the shelves.

Steve chuckles as he locates ones that are good enough for Darcy. “Well... my new suit involves skin tight leggings.” He swaps out the packets and smiles. “I've had to shave my legs a couple of times to stop the rubbing.”

James stares at him, and Steve laughs again, a little shyly, and pushes the cart towards the checkout.

There's a rack of magazines by the till, and James looks at it while Steve loads up the moving belt thing. It's all trash, of course, lurid and disgusting, and though the Winter Soldier's objectives hardly included popular culture gossip, he does recall America's slow downward spiral into _this_. 

One the magazines has a picture of Steve and Darcy kissing on the cover, and the headline, 'Has Captain America Been Corrupted?'. He flicks to the article, and it's all about their quick marriage, and Darcy's drug arrests, and a bunch of pregnancy rumours. _Did she trap him?_ the magazine asks. James looks up at Steve as he puts bags of shopping back into the cart, and wonders.

Steve looks back at him and smiles. “Hey, Buck, you buying that or we done?”

James stuffs the magazine back into the rack and follows him out.

-

Steve spends the rest of the day tidying up the apartment and doing things for the old woman next door. James stays in the apartment and tries to read some of Steve's books, though none of them hold his interest. By the time Steve's finished up, it's the late afternoon, and he sits back down on the couch and picks up his sketchbook.

“Is there anything else you wanna do?” he asks James, twiddling a pencil between his fingers. “Darcy's gonna be home in a couple of hours.”

“I'm fine,” he says, “I'm reading... a book about the Vietnam war.” 

He was there once, for a while, but he doesn't bring that up.

When Darcy gets home, it's like Steve's a dog being called to heel. He leaves his sketchbook open on the couch and practically bounds up to her, leaning down to kiss her.

“Hey, Bucky,” she says, waving at him. He lifts his chin in response, and she smiles a little at him before turning back to Steve.

They start talking softly and James looks over at Steve's sketchbook. He seems to be drawing a comic, uneven squares roughed out on the page. Only the first one has anything in it: a man sitting on a couch with a speech bubble that reads, 'Do you ever feel like life is just passing you by? Like... everyone else is getting on with their lives and you're just stuck, frozen in the crowd?' There's a second bubble at the edge of the square that says, 'No. It's just you'.

Darcy comes over and flops down on the couch, resting her head back against the couch cushion and sighing. Steve sits down on the armrest, reaching out to run his fingers through her hair. She sighs again and leans over to rest her head on his thigh, as he twists strands of her hair around his fingers, totally focused on her. It's like James isn't even there. “Hungry?” he asks.

“ _Yes_ ,” she says, curling her fingers around his leg. “Make me fooood.”

“What do you want?”

“Mm... Hamburgers?”

“That okay with you, Buck?” Steve asks over Darcy's head.

James shrugs. “Whatever the lady wants.”

-

He slopes off to bed early again, and stares at the ceiling. After a while, he hears the television being turned off, and then soft noises coming from their bedroom.

James remembers those same kinds of soft noises from his past, from girls at school, and girls in pubs, and, sometimes, girls in brothels, though the sounds were a lot less soft in those cases.

And he remembers Natalia making those noises, Natalia who was too young and too manipulated, with a man who didn't know anything but how to cause pain. He never tried to hurt her, maybe some little part of James Barnes left inside of him loved her, but he knows that he did hurt her. He hurt her more than it should be possible for any person to hurt another.

He hasn't seen her once since he was arrested, whether because she doesn't want to see him, or by S.H.I.E.L.D.'s design, and he desperately wants to apologise to her, desperately wants to be forgiven, but he doesn't know where he'd even begin, or where it would end.

Steve calls Darcy's name, in a low and ragged tone, and he sounds so awed and in love.

Maybe James deserves to be alone.


	8. Chapter 8

A week passes, and it's strange. It's strange having another person in their home, not being able to walk around naked or have loud sex in the late afternoon, having someone watching them as they go about their lives. 

Steve is still kind of amazed every morning he gets up and sees Bucky in the living room, though, even if Bucky is a little dulled and withdrawn. He keeps himself to himself, doesn't really talk to Darcy all that much, though she's at work every day, so that probably isn't helping to build any kind of friendship between them. 

It'll get better. It's got to get better.

“Buck, we gotta get to your hospital appointment,” Steve calls from the couch, as he laces his boots up. One of the conditions of Bucky's release was that he goes regularly to the hospital, so that they can see how he's doing, see if the drugs he's taking are still working, and just see that he hasn't taken off. The other conditions was that he's always under Steve's supervision, so Steve's had to cancel his own therapy sessions again for the time being. He supposes he could take Bucky with him, but even though he knows he shouldn't, he's kind of nervous about what Bucky would say about it. Bucky's being forced to go to a psychiatrist, but Steve _chose_ to, and maybe he's even starting to not hate it all that much. That's not really a point of view that fits with the lives they used to lead.

“Buck, c'mon,” he calls again when he doesn't hear anything for a moment. “Stop preening in the mirror and let's go.”

There's a thump from the bathroom and Steve jumps up, darting to the door.

“What ha--” He stops at the doorway, words dying on his lips as he's faced with Bucky's back, and a network of scars radiating out from his left shoulder. He hasn't seen Bucky without his shirt on since all of this began, and he can't tear his eyes away. The scars look so _painful_ , raised and stretched out and stretching out to his spine.

Bucky looks up at Steve's reflection in the bathroom mirror, his face ashen. “Dropped something,” he says, “be out in a minute.”

Steve looks at his balled up fist resting on the bathroom counter, and nods. “Okay.”

The trip to the hospital passes in relative silence. On the subway, they wait for the train to get in, and Bucky's eyes keep wandering down the platform to where, Steve realises after a few of minutes, Bucky was following Darcy a couple of months ago.

The heat is still sweltering and oppressive, and Steve is down to just his jeans and a t-shirt, but Bucky has to keep his arm covered, so he's dressed in a thin, long-sleeved sweater of Steve's that's a little on the big side for him. He's even wearing a glove on his left hand. Steve can see sweat collecting along Bucky's hairline, but Bucky doesn't say a word about it.

When they finally get off the subway, Steve's breathes a sigh of relief and rakes his fingers through his hair. “I thought that was never gonna end!” he says, elbowing Bucky gently.

Bucky flinches a little, and mumbles a 'yeah'. Steve keeps forgetting, Bucky really doesn't like being touched these days. It's hard to get through his head, because Bucky always used to be so tactile, and now even a light tap makes him cringe away.

They head to the hospital with what feels like a cloud over their heads, and Steve is honestly, selfishly, relieved to be able to sit outside, _alone_ , while Bucky sees the doctor. While he waits, he considers texting Darcy, but all he'd be doing is complaining, so he plays the demo games on his phone instead.

Bucky is sullen when he comes back out of the office, and Steve does his best to be cheerful enough for the both of them. It's kind of sickening.

“Hey, let's go into Manhattan,” he says as they walk back to the subway.

“Why?” Bucky asks.

“Because...” Steve twists his mouth for a moment before forcing a smile. “Because it's a nice day and you don't want to be cooped up in the apartment, do you?”

Bucky shrugs. “Guess not.”

“Good enough for me!” Steve says.

They get off in Manhattan, hitting a wall of tourists, and Bucky keeps his head down as they push through; he doesn't so much as glance at the pretty girls who hold their camera out and ask him to take their photograph. Steve smiles apologetically, and snaps a picture of them, completely missing the tops of their heads.

“Sorry,” he mutters, handing the camera back and motioning to Bucky to sit down on a bench. “Those girls had absolutely no idea who I was,” he says, and grins. That happens so rarely these days, it's nice.

“What the hell is that?” Bucky asks, ignoring Steve, and points up. Steve looks to where he's indicating, and smiles.

“That's Stark Tower.”

Bucky frowns. “Howard Stark?”

Steve shakes his head. “His son, Tony. He's uh... he's a friend. Sometimes.”

“It's ugly as hell.”

He chuckles. “It is. Tony has weird taste in things. Hey, you wanna get a coffee or something?” He nods to the nearby café, the place that Beth used to work at.

Bucky shrugs. “Sure.”

They sit outside, under the ugly gaze of Stark Tower and watch the world go by. Or, at least, Steve does, and Bucky just looks like he's going to bolt at any moment. Steve's relieved when the waitress comes out to get their orders.

“Oh, Steve!” she says, and he looks up at her in surprise.

“Beth? Hey! Darcy said you'd got...” He trails off and smiles.

“Fired?” she offers. “Yeah, I did. But I took Darcy's advice and told my boss that I was going to sue for wrongful dismissal, and look at that, I got my job back.”

He grins. “Well, I'm glad it worked out.”

“Me too. So, what can I get you guys?”

“I'll have a chocolate sundae... How big is it?”

“Oh, it's pretty big, the glass is about this big,” she says, and holds her hands about six inches apart.

He nods. “I'd better get two, then.” 

She raises her eyebrows a little, but notes it down without comment. “And for you?” she asks Bucky.

He stares at her for a few seconds. “Glass of water.”

All he's had all day is a slice of toast. “Hey, I'm paying, Buck, no need to be frugal. What about a BLT? You like bacon.”

“Fine,” Bucky says.

Steve looks at him and contains a sigh. He turns back to Beth and hands her the menus. “So, two sundaes and a BLT, please.”

“Coming right up,” she says, and walks away.

He resettles in his seat and taps his fingers on the table. “So,” he says.

“You know that girl, huh?” Bucky asks. 

God, an actual question, Steve thinks, thank the Lord. “Yeah, I've been here a couple of times. And, uh... few months back I ran into her in Bryant Park and photographers got pictures of us, and... they tried to spin it that I was cheating on Darcy.” He shakes his head. “It was a pretty stressful time.”

“I guess she's kind of pretty,” Bucky says.

“Um, sure...” Steve says, frowning a little. “But the point is that I wasn't cheating on Darcy...”

“I was just sayin',” Bucky mutters.

“Okay...?” Steve says.

Bucky doesn't respond and Steve runs his fingers through his hair, looking around the little plaza. It's a nice day, so the place is busy, and there aren't many empty tables. There are a lot of couples around and as he scans the place, he settles on a man and woman scribbling on a shared notepad, their legs pressed together. He looks a little harder and smiles; he's pretty sure that's Bruce and Jane, and then Jane lifts her head and confirms it. She taps Bruce on the shoulder and he looks up too, and Steve waves at them and they do an awkward silent conversation across the plaza. Steve motions to the empty seats at the table with a questioning look on his face, hoping to God that they'll come over and diffuse some of the odd tension building between him and Bucky.

“Who the hell are they?” Bucky mutters as they collect up their stuff, and start coming over.

“Oh, they're friends of me and Darcy. Do you mind if they sit with us?”

“No, it's fine,” Bucky mumbles as Bruce and Jane are almost upon them.

“Hey, Steve,” Jane says, smiling, then looks at Bucky, “uh--”

“Sergeant Barnes,” Bruce supplies quickly, “nice to meet you in person.”

Bucky's face twitches. “Just call me James.”

“James,” Bruce repeats softly, and smiles as he takes a seat.

“Steve, introduce us,” Jane says.

“Oh,” he says, shaking himself, “yeah, um, Bucky, this is Bruce Banner and Jane Foster. Bruce is living in that big ugly building at the moment. He's a nuclear physicist-- right?” he adds, not totally sure that he's actually correct about that. Bruce laughs a little and nods. “Jane's an astrophysicist,” he continues. “She's Darcy's best friend. Guys, this is Bucky-- James Barnes, he's, um, well, you know who he is. He's my best friend.”

“Wow,” Bucky murmurs, “sounds like you got clever friends these days.”

“You'd be amazed how many scientists you meet when you're a superhero,” Steve says.

Bucky smiles wanly. “So, you live with that Stark guy?” he asks Bruce, nodding at the tower. Steve is ridiculously happy that Bucky is engaged at all with them, even if his questions are kind of abrasive.

“Yeah. I'm a... kind of a nomad,” Bruce says, “Tony and Pepper are putting me up out of the goodness of their hearts.”

“Well, let's be honest,” Steve says, “he's got the room.”

Bruce laughs. “Yeah. It's getting embarrassing how often I get lost just on my own floor.”

“'Pepper'?” Bucky repeats. “What kind of name is 'Pepper'?”

Steve can see Bruce and Jane both cringe slightly at Bucky's tone. “Pepper is Tony's... girlfriend,” he says, “although, you know, I'm pretty sure that he's going to...”

“If he ever screws up the courage,” Bruce says.

“Wait, what's this?” Jane asks.

“We're pretty sure Tony's going to propose to her at some point,” Bruce tells her.

Her eyebrows go up. “Really?”

“I think he already has the engagement rings,” Steve adds.

Beth brings out the food as they chat a little about whether Tony is brave enough to propose, and Bucky looks at his sandwich with suspicion.

“Do you have enough ice cream, Steve?” Jane asks, nodding to the two glasses in front of him.

“No,” he says, and grins. “Want some?”

“I'm not going to say no to ice cream,” she says, and picks up the other spoon.

“So, what're you two working on?” he asks Bruce.

“Nuclear fission,” he replies, holding up the notepad full of incomprehensible squiggles. 

“What language is that in?” Steve asks.

“Science,” Jane says as she swipes both cherries from the sundaes. Steve doesn't really like cherries anyway, they remind him a little too much of cough medicine.

“Ah,” he says. “Carry on, then.”

They sit in silence for a couple of minutes. Bruce sips his tea, Jane steals little scrapings of Steve's ice cream as he eats it, and Bucky picks at his sandwich

“So, um,” Bruce says after a while, “what are you two doing in Manhattan?”

“Buck had a...” He looks at Bucky, who's staring at his sandwich. “A doctor's appointment.”

“Head shrinker wanted to see that I haven't snapped yet,” Bucky says, and raises his head to smile at them.

Bruce clears his throat and shifts in his seat. “Okay.”

“So, what're you two doing... out,” Steve says in an awkward, stilted way that may as well be a great big flashing sign over his head saying, 'you're making everyone feel uncomfortable, Bucky'.

“I didn't want to be stuck in the tower any more. The air conditioning is nice, but uh, I don't really like feeling trapped, you know?”

Steve snorts. “Sure, that makes sense.”

“I just hadn't seen daylight in about four days,” Jane says.

Steve laughs and looks at his watch. It's almost four, and he doesn't think he's realistically going to be able to drag this out much longer, as he gets to the bottom of the second glass. Bucky's still picking at his sandwich, and Steve assumes that he's not going to finish it any time soon.

“We'd better get going,” he says, looking around for Beth. Bucky kicks his chair back from the table immediately.

“Yeah, we've gotta... gotta go to the lab,” Bruce says, and smiles weakly.

“Yeah,” Steve says, and pulls out his wallet as Beth approaches. Bucky already looks anxious to leave, and Steve has to swallow down the disappointment. He guesses that he knew that a trip to the hospital wouldn't put Bucky in the best of moods, but he didn't expect everything to go this badly off the rails.

Bucky stays pretty much silent on the trip home, though Steve tries to engage him in conversation. He gives up as they get out of Manhattan, and ends up just reading the advertisements on the walls of the subway car. Bucky picks at the seam of his pants and keeps glancing over at Steve, and Steve hopes that he might say something, but he doesn't.

When they get home, he excuses himself to the kitchen to chop vegetables for supper, though he really just needs a minute to think. He stares at the wall, tapping his fingers on the chopping board. Clearly he isn't doing something right, but he just doesn't know what it is.

He can hear Bucky moving around in the living room, and he kind of wants to hide out in the kitchen until Darcy gets home, but that's ridiculous. He pinches the bridge of his nose and takes a deep breath before walking back out.

“Hey,” he says.

Bucky looks around at him from where he's been flicking through the photo album, and smiles slightly. “Hey. You got some nice photos in here. I remember this one.” He presses his fingers to one and Steve comes over to see. It's of him and Bucky from when they were maybe eighteen, standing outside a candy store – he doesn't really recall _why_ it was a candy store, but Bucky is eating something out of a brown bag, a great big shit-eating grin on his face, while Steve looks at the ground. He remembers that Bucky's girlfriend at the time took it; she went to a fancy prep school in Manhattan, Bucky was her rebellion, and Steve had an intense two month crush on her until she left to go to college in Paris.

“That girl was crazy in the sack,” Bucky murmurs.

Steve rolls his eyes and chuckles. “I had a _huge_ crush on her, you know.”

“I know,” Bucky says, “she thought you were cute. Like a little brother, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Steve says dryly. “You knew?”

Bucky smirks. “Course I knew, you weren't exactly subtle. Ever. I mean, _ever_.”

“Very funny,” Steve murmurs. 

Bucky keeps paging through the album, a slight smile on his face as he looks at pictures of himself and Steve and Peggy. He takes a breath as he gets to a group shot of the Commandos, Dum Dum front and centre, and when the pages make the jump from the forties to 2012, his mouth flattens out and he closes the album.

Steve fidgets for a moment as Bucky stares at the cover, then takes a breath. “Can I ask you something?”

Bucky shrugs. “It's a free country.”

Darcy would make a joke about Captain America and freedom right about now. “Do you not want to be called 'Bucky' any more?”

Bucky looks at him and frowns. “Huh?”

“It's just that you keep introducing yourself as 'James'. Do you want me to call you that now?”

He shrugs. “You can call me whatever you want. It's nice to have a name again,” he says softly.

“You didn't have a name?” Steve asks quietly.

“I had a number. And a title. It was easier for everyone that way.”

Steve feels his throat constrict a little. “I...”

Bucky shakes his head. “It's fine. Let's watch TV, okay?”

Steve runs a hand through his hair, ignoring the slight tremor going through it, and forces himself to smile. “Yeah, sure, let's do that.”

-

It's a relief to get into bed later, once Darcy's home. He buries his face in his pillow as Darcy gets undressed and turns off the lights. Once she's in bed, he shifts over to her and buries his face in her neck instead.

“Hey, cuddly,” she murmurs, running her fingers through his hair.

He sighs and curls his hand around her shoulder. “My cheeks hurt from pretending to be upbeat all day,” he complains.

“I'm sorry I haven't been around to help that much,” she says. She got home late from work and by the time she reheated her dinner and sat down to eat it, Bucky had decided to go to bed. Steve had just kissed her on the forehead and gone to have a shower, and then afterwards crawled into bed and whined like an idiot.

He tips his head up to look at her. “You don't need to apologise. You got work, he's my responsibility...” 

“ _Our_ responsibility,” she corrects. “'Responsibility' is kind of a shitty word for it, though, isn't it? You're responsible for, like, a kid or a pet you don't like all that much, not your totally grown up friend.”

“That's what it feels like, though,” he says. “I don't know how much longer I can keep up this positive front.”

“Steve Rogers, admitting that he isn't always a ray of sunshine?” she says, still running her fingers through his hair. It's starting to put him to sleep. “Call the papers!”

“Haha,” he mumbles, and sighs contentedly as she presses her thumb behind his ear.

“I've got to say, I am missing not being able to have wild sex whenever, and wherever, we want to.”

“God, yeah,” he groans, a little thrill going through him at her words, though not strong enough to push through his tiredness. He feels her chest rumble with a faint laugh.

“Look, tomorrow's the weekend and I'll be around. We'll go out and do something. It'll be okay.”

He's not sure he believes her, but it's nice to hear anyway, and he smiles into her collarbone as he falls asleep.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I've finally figured it out, and there are only two chapters to go after this one! I haven't started on either of them yet, so I'm not sure how long I'm going to take to finish this up.

She wakes up to angry swearing in the morning. Steve's awake too, rolling away from her to frown at the door. It's seven in the goddamn morning on a _Saturday_. She did not sign up for this. Or maybe she did, but it sucks anyway.

She runs her fingers through her hair and yawns. “Bucky's in a bad mood,” she says.

“Yeah...” he says. “I better go see what's wrong.”

She watches how his muscles move under his t-shirt as he starts pushing himself up, and sighs. Considering what he said last night, and how slowly he's moving now, she's guessing that he isn't quite ready to put his shiny, happy face on yet. “Nah, it's okay, I'll go.” It's like having a damn kid or something.

“You sure?” he asks, falling back down to his elbows.

She lays her hand flat on his chest and gives him a push, which only works because he lets it. “Yeah, I'm sure, go back to sleep.”

“Thanks,” he says, turning back onto his side.

She pats his arm and gets up, grabbing her robe off the back of the door and pulling it on before leaving the room. She can hear Bucky in the kitchen, banging something angrily, and she takes a second to compose herself before going in. She's trying her best with him, at least for the little slivers of time that they've spent together, but he just... he just kind of freaks her out. And he doesn't seem to like her much, so there's that.

“Everything okay in here?” she asks, peering around the kitchen door.

Bucky glares at her. “Toaster broke,” he says.

Said toaster is on its side on the counter, smouldering slightly, and yes, it looks pretty broken. And she liked that toaster, too, it was all cute and vintage-y.

“What happened?” she asks, risking a couple of steps into the kitchen.

“Arm short-circuited it,” he mutters.

“Seriously? Are you okay, did you get electrocuted?”

“I'm fine,” he practically growls.

“Okay, well...” She comes over and pulls the toaster's plug out of the socket and sets it upright, checking that it isn't actively on fire. It looks okay, so she sets it aside. “I'll make breakfast.”

“Really?” he says. “Not gonna get Steve to make it?”

This is for Steve, she reminds herself. “No. What do you want?”

He looks at the toaster. “Toast.”

“Fine, I'll make it in the oven,” she says. She moves over to the oven to turn it on, and Bucky continues to stare at her. “Look, why don't you go sit down in the living room or something?” she says, because it's more polite than telling him to fuck off.

He frowns a little. “Okay,” he says quietly, and leaves the room.

She watches his retreat and sighs. She doesn't know what the fuck to make of this guy.

-

Bucky eats his breakfast mutinously in front of the television as Darcy turns her computer on and checks the weather forecast. Eighty one degrees, at the end of August? Fucking bullshit, man.

“You talk like a soldier,” Bucky says, eyes still on the screen. When Steve comments on her colourful use of language – normally after some long tirade about some asshole who's wronged her – it's with a grin and a laugh that gets him thumped on the head with a cushion.

When Bucky says it, it sounds like she's failed etiquette school or something.

“Thanks,” she says, and shuts the laptop. “I'm going to go get ready. Enjoy _The Flintstones_.”

He grunts and changes the channel. She rolls her eyes as she gets up. It's like having the little brother she never wanted.

When she gets back into the bedroom, Steve is sitting up in bed, staring at the wall.

“Steve?” she says, sitting down next to him and reaching out to touch his shoulder.

He turns and looks at her, his eyes slightly pink-rimmed, his mouth twisted like he's trying not to cry.

“Hey,” she says, shifting in closer to him, and wraps her arm around his waist. “What's wrong?”

He swallows heavily and looks down at the sheets. “I feel a bit... overwhelmed,” he says quietly. “I don't... I don't know what to do any more...” He starts picking at his nails. “With Bucky,” he adds, just above a whisper.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she murmurs, and curls her other arm around him, kissing his cheek. “I'm sorry, do you want to call S.H.I.E.L.D.?”

He shakes his head. “I can't betray him like that.”

“It's not a betrayal,” she says, but he's still shaking his head, his mouth a firm line, which is better than the shakiness of before. He takes a deep breath and blinks hard a couple of times.

“I'm just freaking out,” he says, and wipes his hand across his nose. “It's okay, it's fine.”

She leans around to look in his face again – his cheeks are a little blotchy, but he isn't _actually_ crying. “You sure?”

“Yeah.” He smiles slightly, and leans his head against hers. “I'm sure. I just woke up and everything sort of... came crashing down on me for a minute. I'm fine. I'm sorry.”

“Don't apologise,” she murmurs, sliding her fingers through his hair. He closes his eyes and sighs through his nose.

“Sorry,” he says, the corners of his mouth tipping up, and she knows that he probably thinks that's the cleverest joke in the goddamn world. She tugs his hair a little and he chuckles, opening his eyes again. “Okay,” he says, “panic over. Is Buck okay?”

“Broke the toaster. I made him toast in the oven instead.”

“Did he eat it?”

“Angrily, but yeah.”

He nods. “Okay, good. 'Cause he hasn't really been eating very much. That's been worrying me.” He sighs. “Everything's worrying me.”

“I can tell. Anything you want to do today?”

“I, uh...” He scratches at his neck. “Bucky always liked Coney Island, maybe we could... go there? Maybe it'll... shake something loose.”

“Day trip!” she says. “I'll wear a dress, it'll be awesome.”

He smiles a little. “Okay, thanks.”

She sighs and gives him a significant look, and he smiles some more. “I know, I don't have to thank you for stuff... But I'm still gonna, so get used to it.”

She bats him on the nose. “ _Fine_. Come on, you need to eat, and I need to do my teeth.”

“And I need to talk to Bucky,” he adds, going back to picking at his nails for a moment.

“You do,” she says sympathetically. She takes one of his hands before he starts gnawing on his nails, and gives it a tug. “Come on, up and at 'em, soldier.”

He follows her out of the bedroom, and stands against the wall facing Bucky. He's trying so hard to be casual, she can tell, but his body language just screams awkwardness and maybe a little fear.

“Hey, me and Darce were thinking about going to Coney Island today. What do you think?” he asks Bucky.

Bucky raises his head and stares at her for a moment, then looks back at Steve. “Sure.”

“Yeah? You okay with going out? If there's anything else you'd rather do...”

He shrugs. “Nah, we can do your thing.”

Steve smiles, and even though it's still a bit unsure, it lights up his face. “Okay, great. I'm gonna eat, and then we'll... get going?”

“Sure,” Bucky says again, the corner of his mouth tipping up a little. Steve looks pathetically pleased by this, and it kind of breaks Darcy's heart. She sighs quietly and heads for the bathroom.

-

They get out of the apartment in the late afternoon, once she's covered every inch of her bare skin in sunscreen, and Steve's braided her hair. It's the first time he's done it for her, and he really is very good at it. Bucky stares at them suspiciously and Steve laughs as he pushes the last bobby pin into her hair.

“The showgirls taught me,” he says.

“Yeah, you were like their little pet, huh?” Bucky says.

Steve keeps smiling. “Probably.”

They take the subway to Coney Island, and of course Steve immediately heads to a hot dog stand, asking if Darcy and Bucky want anything.

“I'm saving myself for ice cream,” Darcy says.

“I'm not hungry,” Bucky grunts.

Steve smiles tightly and buys the hot dog, signing a couple of napkins for people standing in line with him.

“So, what should we do?” Darcy asks, sliding her hand into Steve's free one. There's a sign for a retro-looking circus that looks kind of cool. She points at it. “What about that?”

“Yeah, maybe. Me and Buck used to go to the circus a lot when we were kids.” He looks over at Bucky. “Remember that?”

Bucky squints at the sign, which reads 'Coney Island Circus Sideshow'. “Maybe you can sell me to the sideshow,” he says.

“Bucky...” Steve murmurs.

Bucky rolls his eyes. “It's a _joke_.”

Steve sucks on his bottom lip for a second, then nods. “Okay, what about the museum?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Darcy keeps a strong grip on his hand as they walk around the museum. A bunch of the exhibits are from the thirties, and there are even a couple of pieces about local boy, Captain America. Steve blushes a little and laughs when she takes a picture of it on her phone. Bucky trails after them like a sullen child, and she's barely resisting the urge to yell at him to at least pretend that he doesn't hate everything for five minutes. Which maybe isn't really fair, she knows, but the stress of everything is like a physical weight around Steve's neck, and she hates to watch how it's dragging him down.

When they get out of the museum, she skips over to an ice cream vendor and buys two towering ice cream cones, for her and Steve. 

“You want one, Bucky?” she asks, licking away ice cream dripping down her hand. He follows the movement for a moment, then shakes his head.

Her phone goes as they walking along the pier. She's got through maybe a quarter of the ice cream, while Steve has already eaten the cone of his. It's her mom, and they chat for a few minutes as Darcy leans against the railing overlooking the beach, licking her ice cream. After a while, Mom asks about Steve, and Darcy holds the phone out to him.

“Mom wants to talk to you,” she says, and he jumps at the chance to take the phone off her. She knows he likes her mother, but she's pretty sure that the prospect of talking to her isn't normally that exciting for him.

“Hey, Elaine!” he says.

Darcy smiles at Bucky, who doesn't smile back, then looks back out at the beach. Steve is chatting amiably with Mom, like nothing's wrong, and Darcy is a little jealous of his ability to block shit out when he needs to. Of course, he can't do it with her, everything is always right there on the surface, but she kind of likes that, that he feels comfortable enough around her to let all his defences down.

Steve is laughing at something Mom is saying, and it's nice to hear, even if it does sound a little forced. She looks around at him and smiles for a moment before her gaze wanders. She turns and scans the pier-- _fuck_ , where's Bucky?

“Steve,” she calls, and he looks up at her, a slight smile on his face that slips when he meets her eyes. “Where's Bucky?”

He glances around, spinning around in a full circle. “Elaine, I'm sorry, I gotta go,” he says quickly and ends the call. “Weren't you watching him?” he asks, with a faint note of accusation in his voice, loud enough for passing tourists to look at them curiously.

“He was standing right there a minute ago!” she says, pointing to where Bucky was glowering at her a few minutes ago. So maybe it wasn't a minute ago. Fuck. She dumps her ice cream in a trash can and takes her phone back off Steve. “Okay, so let's look for him.” It's not like he could have gone far, it's not like some creeper has picked him up. Maybe they should have explained stranger danger to him, she thinks, slightly hysterically. Jesus, this is ridiculous.

“Yeah,” he says, scanning the area. She guesses that he can pick out more detail with his crazy eyesight than she can. “He isn't here.”

“Let's split up,” she says.

He shakes his head. “No. If he's... if something's happened, then you can't... Oh, Jesus...” he mutters.

She grabs his hand. “It'll be okay. We'll find him.”

“Okay...” he murmurs. “I'm sorry that I...”

“Don't worry about that,” she says. “Come on.”

They check everywhere, the museum, the rides, the circus, all the food stands, before moving onto the surrounding area. Steve is swearing under his breath as they run from place to place in this ridiculously oppressive heat, and Darcy's dress has fully adhered to her back by the time they get to MCU park. She pats Steve's shoulder to get his attention, and points to the Wall of Remembrance for 9/11 victims.

He marches over there, and lo and behold, there's Bucky, staring up at the wall.

“What the hell, Bucky?” Steve says as they approach him, loud enough to almost be a shout. People turn to look, and Darcy hears at least one person ask their friend, 'is that Captain America?'

Yes, random bystander, she thinks, yes that is Captain America yelling at someone at a 9/11 memorial, good eye.

“Let's go home,” Darcy murmurs.

“Yeah,” Steve says, rubbing a hand over his face.

Bucky actually winces a bit. “Sorry,” he says. “ I just wanted to...” He shrugs.

“It's...” Steve shakes his head, shoulders slumping in defeat. “It's fine, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have yelled.”

Bucky nods and falls into step with Steve and Darcy. “I am sorry,” he repeats softly.

Steve's face is all tensed up and full of barely contained emotions. “I know,” he murmurs.

-

Steve has a particularly violent nightmare, hours later. She wakes because he's pulling at the sheet, hard, and her pillow comes sliding out from under her head with the force. 

He's panting, making these odd cut off sobbing sounds, fingers clutching so hard at the mattress that she wonders if he might tear through it. She rolls out of bed, her own heart pounding, and lets him pull everything apart. He rips the sheet completely free of the mattress, shoves the pillows aside, and curls up in a ball. She stays where she is, sitting on the floor, for a few minutes, just to be sure that he's done, then carefully sits back down on the bed.

“Steve?” she says quietly.

“Don't let go...” he sobs into the mattress.

She winces. The Bucky-falling-from-the-train nightmare; she really shouldn't be surprised after the day he's had.

“Steve,” she calls again, and he freezes, his fingers flexing around the bit of sheet left on the bed. She risks reaching out and running her fingertips along his knuckles, and he breathes out, hand twitching for a second before he grabs hold of hers. “Steve?”

His eyes flicker open and he looks at the bed. “Did I-- did I hurt you?” he whispers.

“No, no,” she says, shifting closer so he can rest his head in her lap, which he does readily. She strokes his hair. “No, of course not,” she says, “it was just a nightmare. Nothing bad happened.”

He presses his face harder into her thigh. “I'm not coping very well,” he mumbles.

That just about breaks her heart. “I know,” she says, “it'll be okay.”

In the morning, she gets up way before Steve, who doesn't seem to be in any mood to get out of bed, anyway. She makes herself something to eat, gives Bucky something when he comes out of his room, and starts making plans. When she goes back into the bedroom at nine thirty, Steve's still in bed, but he's awake, at least.

“Sorry about last night,” he mumbles into his pillow.

“Forget about it,” she says, sitting down beside him. “Okay, look, here's how today is going to go: you're going to get up, shower, drink the protein shake I left for you in the kitchen, and then you're going to go to the appointment I made for you with Dr Tanaka at two and I'm going to stay here with Bucky.” She'll be fucked if they're going to have another fucked up day like yesterday – and probably every other day this past week.

“Uh...” Steve murmurs, pushing himself up a little. Going the right way, at least. “But... it's Sunday.”

“Tanaka works Sundays,” she says.

“Really?” he says, eyebrows rising.

“Yes. She's a S.H.I.E.L.D.-approved therapist, she works unusual hours.”

He frowns. “Okay... But you can't stay here with Bucky alone...”

“Yes, I can,” she says.

He looks at irritably. “What if he hurts you?”

“You're the only one he's hurting,” she says.

Steve swallows. “Yeah...” 

“Okay, so we're agreed. Get out of bed and hop in the shower, soldier,” she says.

He smiles shakily, and nods. “Yeah, okay.” He leans forward and kisses her. “Thanks, for... for everything.”

“I'm perfect, I know.”

“You are,” he says.

Bucky gets pretty suspicious when Steve gets ready to leave a few hours later. They've been awkward and stilted with each other all morning, and Darcy hasn't even bothered trying to start a conversation with Bucky yet – Steve doesn't need the stress of them not getting on along with everything else.

“Where're you going?” he asks.

“Just out for a while, I got some things to do,” Steve says, grabbing his motorbike keys from the bowl. Good, she thinks, it'll do him good to ride his bike.

“What things?” Bucky pushes.

“Just things,” Steve says, snagging his helmet off a hook by the front door. “Don't be so nosy, Buck.”

Darcy kisses him goodbye, and Bucky looks kind of put out about the whole situation, but he doesn't say anything. She sits down on the couch with her laptop while he reads a book, and they pass an uncomfortable half an hour like this, until she decides to woman up. She shuts the laptop and turns to look at him on the other end of the couch. He glances at her out of the corner of his eye a couple of times, before finally putting the book down with a huff.

“What?” he says.

“Let's talk,” she says.

“What?” he repeats.

“We're going to talk,” she says firmly.

He shrugs. “Okay.”

She nods, narrowing her eyes a little. “So, look, I know you don't like me. I don't like you that much right now, either. And, you know, I get that you're pretty fucked up, but Steve's pretty fucked up too.”

Bucky purses his lips. “Thanks.”

“You're welcome.”

He looks pissed, and starts chewing on the inside of his mouth. Darcy briefly questions the wisdom of starting a conversation with a former assassin in such a manner, but what he says is, “Did he have a nightmare last night? I heard something.”

“Yeah, about you.”

“Oh.”

“He has a lot of nightmares. About you dying. About me dying, about him dying, about Peggy dying. You can probably see the pattern here.”

He nods.

“And the thing is,” she continues, “every time something bad happens, it chips away at him a little more. He almost died twice in the last year, I got attacked a few months ago, now this.”

“What happened to him?” he asks. Dude doesn't care about her being attacked, of course.

She sighs. “Well, a couple of days after Christmas last year, he went on a mission to save... someone.” She probably shouldn't tell Bucky the particulars of these stories. “He was attacked by a... monster, and got seven shades of shit beaten out of him. But he healed up. Then in February, he took shrapnel to the gut, and he was in surgery for six hours having it removed. I think that we all...” She fells her eyes grow hot, and doesn't bother to hide it from Bucky. “We all thought he was going to die. That was six days after me and Steve got married. But he healed from that too, in a couple of days, and because nothing can hurt him permanently on the outside, people think that goes for the inside too, but it doesn't.”

“He never told me he got hurt,” Bucky says. “Either of the... ways that you said.”

“When does he ever volunteer information about his problems to people?”

“Never,” Bucky says.

“Exactly. So the last year has been pretty hard for him.”

“He ain't got a monopoly on that,” Bucky mutters.

“That's not really my point.”

He nods, picking at his nails. Some of his mannerisms are so like Steve's, it's kind of amazing. “Y'know,” he says after a minute, “I don't hate you or anything.”

“You could have fooled me,” she says.

He snorts.

Under better circumstances, she's pretty sure they'd be buddies. “So why are you such an asshole to me?”

He shrugs. “I dunno.”

“Maybe you should figure that out.”

“Maybe,” he echoes.

She sighs as he keeps looking at his hands. Steve's not going to be back for at least another two hours, and it's going to be an uncomfortable couple of hours if this is all they're going to say to each other.

“Is there anything...” She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Do you want to talk?”

“I thought we were talking,” he says.

Jesus. If this is what Steve's been dealing with since he was twelve, it's no wonder he can put up with her crap. “Fine. Is there a topic of conversation that you'd like to introduce?”

She kind of wants to ask him about what the hell the situation with him and Natasha is, but if Steve can't get him to talk about it, then she isn't going to have any luck.

He shrugs. “Like what?”

“Oh, I don't know, the weather?” she snaps, then squeezes her eyes shut. That wasn't fair.

Bucky huffs something close to a laugh, though, which is probably the happiest she's ever seen him. “It's too hot.”

“Yeah.”

He sighs, and looks at her. “I didn't used to be like this. Things used to be easy.”

“I know,” she says. “Do you want to watch a movie?”

“Sure,” he says. “Steve said something called the 'Forbidden Planet' was good?”


	10. Chapter 10

The walls in Steve's apartment are thin, and James can hear the hum of activity in their bedroom whenever they're awake. He hears when they're talking, when they're trying to quietly have sex, and when Steve has a nightmare. James lies in his narrow bed and listens to the soothing words Darcy has for Steve, and when he closes his eyes, he sees the faces of dead and orphaned children. Steve would lose his mind if he saw even a second of what goes on in James's head.

Darcy's words stick in James's head for a couple of days, and James can see that Steve is right on the edge, but when he sees how she fusses over Steve, how they fuss over each other, it just makes him _angry_.

On Friday he wakes up to Steve cleaning the living room, with little bud things in his ears. His back is to James as he rearranges the books on the bookcase, and he's humming quietly under his breath, though the moment James steps out of the bedroom, he turns and looks over his shoulder.

He tugs one bud out of his ear and smiles. “Hey.”

“What's that?” James asks, pointing at the white lead snaking from ear phones in Steve's ears to the pocket of his pants.

“Oh, it's an iPod,” Steve says, pulling the little object out of his pocket to show James. “First present Darcy ever gave me.”

“Uh huh,” James says. “Why're you doing fucking around with the bookcase?”

“Well, they're supposed to be in alphabetical order...” he says, smiling slightly.

“Sorry, I fucked that up, I guess.”

“It doesn't matter,” Steve says, but he's still rearranging the damn books.

“I'm gonna have something to eat,” James mutters and slopes off to the kitchen.

Steve spends all morning cleaning, going in and out of rooms tidying things up. James pulls his feet up onto the couch as Steve vacuums, and watches him with interest. He doesn't remember Steve doing things like this before. He was just... a guy. That girl's changed him.

“I'm gonna do the laundry,” Steve says a few minutes later, basket under his arm full of bed linen. “I got your sheets, want me to put anything else in?”

James shakes his head. “You should start wearing an apron,” he says. The comment hangs awkwardly between them for a moment.

Steve's eyebrow quirks . “Couldn't find one in my size,” he says before he turns to leave.

He leaves the door open, and James hears him knocking on the old lady's door. “Mrs Rossi?” he says. “I'm going down to the laundry room, want me to put anything on for you?”

She loads him up with a bunch of stuff, it sounds like, and asks him to help her with some stuff when he comes back up. The door to his bedroom slightly open, too, and through the crack, James can see a bright red wall. He cranes his neck to try to get a better look, and casts a glance at the front door. He waits it out a few minutes, until he hears Steve's footsteps coming back out of the basement laundry room.

“I'm gonna be in Mrs Rossi's apartment for a while,” he calls to James.

“'Kay,” James calls back. He gives the bedroom door another glance and gets up.

The room is pretty big, a lot bigger than the box that James is sleeping in. Three of the walls are white, the fourth red and covered with pictures – mostly drawings of Darcy and photographs of... Darcy. In fact, everything about the room has Darcy's mark stamped on it, from the crap on top of the chest of drawers to the folded up floral blanket hanging on the end of the bed to the giant blue teddy bear in the corner. What the fuck is that thing?

Now would be the time to leave the room – this is just simple curiosity, but any further is going to be snooping. The closet door is open, though, and he just takes a step over to it to have a look. It's mostly Darcy's clothes, it looks like – a third of the clothes on the rail are white, beige, or black, and the other two thirds are a rainbow of different colours. There are a bunch of shoes littering the bottom of the wardrobe, some stacked on top of each other, along with one solitary cardboard box.

He listens for a moment to make sure that Steve isn't coming back, then kneels down and pulls the box out. The contents rattle inside, and when he pulls the lid off, he's actually shocked. There are all sorts of sex toys in there – dildos, vibrators, a harness. The Winter Soldier got into his fair share of trouble, James knows what that's for. Steve's getting ploughed by his girl, or at least she wants to be ploughing him. James guesses it makes sense; she's got Steve by the balls already.

He shoves the box back into the closet and gets back up. Maybe Steve's changed a lot more than he thought.

Steve comes back to the apartment half an hour later, by which time James has got back to the couch and is flicking through TV channels.

“I'm just gonna clean the kitchen,” Steve says as he passes.

“Yep,” James says.

He settles on some lousy looking movie as Steve clatters around in the kitchen, at one point exclaiming, “ _What_ the hell happened to this oven?”

A little while later his phone goes, and James listens to his jokey back and forth with Stark's kid.

“Do not do that,” Steve is saying, “he's not gonna thank you for it. C'mon, Tony, he's-- yeah, but-- _Tony_... All right, well, your funeral, I guess...”

A couple of minutes later, he's on the phone to that Bruce guy, telling him that he's about to get set with someone, and they chat amiably for a couple of minutes too, before Steve comes back out of the kitchen and tells James that he's going to go put the washing in the dryer.

All in, Steve spends about three hours cleaning, while James sits on the couch and alternately watches him and watches the TV, until Steve finally sits down beside him and puts his feet on the coffee table. “What're you watching?”

James shrugs. “I dunno. Done being a housewife for the day?”

Steve smiles thinly. “At least you've got clean sheets now.”

“You always do all the cleaning?”

“No, but Darcy works long hours.”

“She can't work less hours?”

Steve frowns. “Maybe she could. We got a problem, Buck?”

“I'm just saying.”

Steve clicks his tongue, and settles his arms over his chest. “Okay, well. Let's watch a movie.”

By the time Darcy gets home, at almost nine pm, Steve's said about five words to James, mostly about food and changing the channel. Steve sounds so fucking relieved to see her, they melt right into each other at the front door. James rolls his eyes.

“Frozen pizza for dinner?” Steve asks.

“You know just what to say to a girl,” Darcy jokes, tugging him down for another kiss.

“Jesus,” James mutters under his breath. From the way Steve's back stiffens, he heard that.

When they're finally able to tear themselves away from each other, Darcy comes over and sits on the couch.

“Bucky,” she says.

“Darcy.”

“Good day?”

“Fine. You?”

“Same as always.”

“Steve cleaned the apartment for you.”

“I'll thank him later.”

James smirks. “I'm sure you will.”

Darcy narrows her eyes a little, and looks at the TV. “We're not watching this.”

-

For once, he stays up longer than they do, flicking through TV channels. He's not going to be able to sleep, so what's even the point of getting into bed? Darcy asks him to turn the volume down, so he ends up watching a twenty four hour news channel on mute, cycling through murders and bombings and terrorist attacks, all things in his repertoire. There's a long report about some guy being imprisoned for murder that James watches four times, until he knows every word that scrolls across the bottom of the screen.

That's where he should be. Prison. Somewhere secure enough to hold him. Somewhere where they'll fill him full of drugs to keep him quiet, to stop him thinking. The pills he's taking right now just aren't cutting it.

The door to Steve and Darcy's bedroom opens hours after they went to bed, and Darcy comes out and goes into the kitchen. He hears the water running for a moment, and then she comes back out with a glass of water. She stops as she passes by the couch again, and frowns. 

“You okay?” she asks softly.

He turns his stare from the TV to her. _Say something_ , he tells himself, but no words are forthcoming. She looks at him like he's crazy, _which he is_ , and clears her throat.

“Okay then,” she murmurs, and goes back into the bedroom. Softly, he can hear her saying to Steve, 'here's your water', and Steve mumbling his thanks.

James stares at the screen for another hour or so before going to bed, as the sun starts to come up.

-

When he can't sleep, he thinks. He tries not to think, but when the dam of his mind broke, all his memories came back, from before and after. They bombard him in the dark.

_Natalia dances. She's always dancing, spinning on her toes in an empty room, arms held out in a circle in front of her. It strikes him as beautiful, even though he doesn't know what beautiful is. He's never seen anything beautiful before._

_“She thinks she's dancing with the Bolshoi Ballet,” his handler says with a smirk._

_He frowns. “How old is she?” He's seen her before, and she was very small then. He doesn't think it was that long ago._

_“Thirteen,” the handler says and walks away, leaving him to watch her through the glass._

_How old am I, he thinks._

_She calls him, 'Yasha'._

_“Why?” he asks, as they train._

_“Well, I can't call you 'Winter Soldier', that's not a name.” She counters his move and flips him onto his back. She is sixteen and her soft bra no longer contains her breasts properly. He is however old he is and he feels winded long after he gets back up off the mat._

_She has bright red hair and soft red lips on his when he fucks her against a wall. She makes little noises that might be pleasure or might be pain. He shouts as he comes, burying his face into her shoulder. Tears roll down his face afterwards, and she wipes them off his cheeks with the pads of her thumbs. His chest feels tight and something whispers in the back of his mind._

_“Thanks, doll,” he says, in English, and she laughs and asks him where he heard that. He doesn't have an answer._

_He's in a room, years later, with a gun lying at his side. Natalia is long gone. Dead. His handlers chose not to wipe her from his memory, because the pain makes him more vicious. Because that's what they do, they manipulate his brain when they need to. He doesn't know how he failed to realise this before, but he feels the absences now, even though he doesn't know what's absent._

_There's a newspaper lying on a table, near the apartment's dead owner, blood blooming out in a circle on the carpet from a gunshot to the head. On the front page it says, 'Captain America ties the knot in secret wedding'._

__Captain America _. He frowns. That voice whispers in the back of his head again._

_The door to the room opens and he shoots the man between the eyes._

_He takes the newspaper as he leaves._

_It doesn't take long to find out who he is-- who he was. An American, a different kind of soldier. A friend to Captain America._

_He's been out of his box for too long, too often, and his handlers are lazy. The Cold War is over, the Red Room is obsolete, the Winter Soldier is coming apart. One dies with a knife in his throat, the other with a gunshot to the stomach._

The shower running shakes him out of his thoughts.

“Uhn, _Darcy_ ,” he hears Steve groan over the water before he's shushed.

James drags himself upright and grabs his bottle of pills off the night stand. He wonders what would happen if he just took the whole lot. Maybe nothing, his body isn't exactly the way it used to be. He could still try, he guesses, but he just dry swallows the two he's supposed to and puts the bottle back on the night stand. He's not even sure why.

He's not the only one who takes pills. Darcy takes one little pill every day at six. Her phone beeps and she fishes a little strip out of her bag and takes it. 

On Thursday, though, he notices that her phone doesn't beep and she doesn't take a pill, and a couple of days later she's curled up on the couch complaining about feeling sick. Steve fusses over her, brings her lots of things, painkillers, chocolate, hot water bottles. 

“Best husband ever,” she says, leaning up to give him a kiss.

“I know,” Steve says stupidly and pulls himself up to straddle the arm of the couch next to her.

“You knock her up or something, Steve?” James says sharply.

Steve expression darkens for a moment and he purses his lips.

“Kinda the exact opposite, dude,” Darcy says lightly. “You're a ladies' man, you know what ladies do once a month, right?”

James shifts. “Oh,” he says.

“Periods are a really conversation stopper for guys,” Darcy observes, and looks back at the TV, smirking. A spike of hatred wells up inside of him before he forces it back down.

On Monday, when he comes out of his room, Steve is sitting on the couch with his feet pulled onto the coffee table, his nose very close to the page he's drawing on in his sketchbook. Darcy's already left for work.

Steve looks up at him and smiles. “Hey, Buck. Sleep well?”

James smiles back tightly. “Sure.”

Steve spends most of the morning scribbling in his book. James goes back into his room under the pretence of getting dressed, but he stays in there a couple of hours and Steve doesn't come check on him.

He looks at his arm. Steve was horrified when he saw him shirtless, and James can't blame him. He looks like a badly stitched doll. The appendage doesn't even feel like a part of himself – it never did, but it didn't matter back then because he didn't _have_ a sense of self. He'd cut it off, but then he'd just be more of a freak than he already is. He tried to claw it off, in the beginning, and they disciplined him for that.

There's a knock at the door, and James quickly pulls a t-shirt on.

“Can I come in?” Steve calls.

“Yep, sure.”

He opens the door and leans in. “Hey, so--”

James's eyes fall on Steve's t-shirt. “What are you wearing?”

Steve looks down at the Captain America shield on his t-shirt and chuckles. “Oh yeah, Darce gave it to me.”

“Uh huh...” James murmurs. Can he never get the fuck away from Captain America?

Steve shifts from foot to foot. “So, uh, a friend of mine just called and he was wondering-- I was wondering, if you'd be okay with going to my gym later and maybe working out? My friend's training to be a... superhero, and I've been helping, but obviously not so much recently.”

James shrugs. “Sure.”

“Yeah? 'Cause we don't have to.”

“Really, it's fine, I don't care.”

“Okay, well... thanks,” Steve says, and smiles a little.

“You don't gotta thank me Steve,” James says irritably.

Steve smiles wider. “You sound like Darcy,” he says before he goes back into the living room.

James grimaces.

They walk over to the gym in the late afternoon. It's a run down little place that reminds James of the place he used to box at when he was a teenager. The places he was later locked in and forced to train for hours on end.

There's a guy standing outside in a t-shirt and sweatpants, and when he sees Steve he waves.

“That's Sam,” Steve says quietly as they cross the street towards him.

“Uh huh,” James says.

Steve makes awkward introductions, stumbling over what to call James.

“James, Bucky, whatever,” James says, shaking Sam's hand.

“Okay. Well, it's just 'Sam' for me.”

They start off warming up, Steve gets Sam to jump rope, which Sam grumbles about and Steve rolls his eyes and mimics him behind his back.

James sticks to boxing, pulling his left hand punches every time.

“So, how's Darcy?” Sam asks.

Steve lights up, like he always does when something concerns Darcy. “She's good, working a lot.”

“She was whining on the couch all weekend,” James chips in.

Sam's eyebrows raise a little and Steve clears his throat. “She was feelin' unwell.”

“Aw, and you nursed her back to health?” Sam says, letting the jump rope go slack. James stops boxing and watches them joke with each other.

“'Course I did,” Steve says. “Not like she doesn't regularly nurse me back to health... in whatever way,” he murmurs.

Sam nods understandingly. “She's a keeper, for sure.”

“That girl's made you soft,” James says. He's not sure why, his mouth just starts making words.

Steve and Sam both frown at him. Sam recovers first. 

“Yeah, you're just a big softie,” he says, while Steve's brow is still furrowed. “I've got to say, I wish you'd go a bit softer on me when we train.”

Steve looks at him and rolls his eyes. “There's a reason why I'm Captain America, you know.”

Because you're everyone's golden boy, James thinks.

“There's a reason why you're an asshole, you know,” Sam counters.

Steve laughs and tells him to come spar with him. James watches them go at it, Steve going easy on the guy and still wiping the floor with him. James remembers going toe to toe with Steve after the serum, and he always ended up on the floor with a surprised and smug Steve above him. Steve wouldn't be able to lay him out like that now, he reckons. He flexes his left arm.

“Hey,” he calls, “stop beating on that poor chump and try me.”

“Uh,” Steve murmurs, loosening his grip on Sam's arm.

“I've been called a lot of things, but never a 'chump',” Sam says. “Hanging out with you guys is like being in an old timey movie.”

“Come on, Steve,” James says, walking over to him. “Remember how we used to rough house when we were kids?”

“I remember we had to stop after I had an asthma attack and almost choked to death,” Steve says, face carefully blank.

Yes, James almost killed him that day. Swore he'd never lay a finger on Steve again, even in jest. Kept the promise until after the serum, at least.

“Well, you don't have asthma any more, do you?” he asks.

Steve looks at him for a long moment. “No,” he says finally. He takes a couple of steps back and lifts his wrapped hands. “C'mon then.”

Steve has the advantage, at least at first. He gets a couple of light blows to James's face in, manages to spin him around and pin his right arm behind his back, ducks James's answering punches with a laugh.

“Gotta be faster than that, Buck,” he jokes, bouncing away.

“Oh, _burn_ ,” Sam says from the sidelines, laughing.

James feels his lip curl. Steve comes closer again, eyes bright. The Winter Soldier hates that face, he _hates_ it. His handlers revived him again just to kill him – he had so many chances to kill him, why didn't he take them? 

He doesn't pull his punch this time, catching Steve on the jaw and spinning him in circle.

“Whoa...” Sam says.

Steve blinks heavily as the Soldier comes at him again, and the second punch draws blood, a trickle of it rolling down the corner of his mouth. He wipes it away and stares at the Soldier-- James-- the Soldier-- in shock.

“Bucky...” Steve says.

Fucking _Bucky_ , he thinks, and aims a blow at Steve's stomach, which Steve only just manages to block.

“Steve!” Sam says.

“Stay out of this, Sam!” he says, grabbing the Soldier's left arm and trying to twist it away. Steve doesn't seem to understand how strong the Soldier is, but a swift punch to the side of the head probably gets him thinking about it.

They're almost equally matched, doing about the same amount of damage to each other with each blow, but the Soldier's arm puts him over the top, and after a couple of minutes he manages to flip Steve and knock him to the ground. Steve tries to edge away, but the Soldier is on him, pressing his left arm to Steve's throat.

“B... ucky,” Steve chokes out. “S... top.”

He remembers Steve gasping for breath, curled up on the floor of Bucky's room. He was supposed to be back at the orphanage already, but Mom was out and there was no one there to tell them to stop. He didn't realise, then, at thirteen, that Steve couldn't take it. Steve liked rough housing, he never complained. He was skinny but so was everyone else, back then. So was Bucky.

Steve couldn't catch his breath, no matter how hard he tried, no matter how much Bucky told him to breathe – just breathe, Jesus, it's not that hard, is it? Steve couldn't do it, though, couldn't do this one easy thing – the easiest thing in the world to do.

“Becky!” Bucky yelled to his sister. “Go get the doc from downstairs, _now_.”

He swore he'd never hurt Steve again.

There are hands on him, trying to pull him off Steve. Steve's friend. Someone looking out for Steve.

He lets go like he's been burnt, stumbling away. Sam looks at him in shock, and then at Steve, who's already back on his feet. His face and t-shirt are covered in blood. There's blood staining the shield.

“Jesus Christ... Are you okay?” Sam asks him. Steve's eye is swelling up. He licks blood from his mouth.

“Yeah,” he says roughly.

“Um, do you... want my spare t-shirt?” Sam asks haltingly.

“Yeah, thanks,” Steve mutters, locking eyes with James. “Don't you dare move,” he says, and turns to go to the locker room.

Sam looks at James and then at Steve's departing back. “Right,” he says, grabs his gym bag, and follows Steve.

-

James feels numb on the walk home. Sam plainly doesn't want to leave them alone, but Steve tells him to go home and that he'll return the t-shirt soon. When they get back to Steve's building, Steve stops at the front door, keys in his hand.

He turns and looks at James. “If you ever... if you _ever_ raise your hand to Darcy...”

“I won't,” James mumbles.

Steve looks... disgusted. He's never looked at James like that before. “You better not,” he growls.

They stay in the apartment together for a painful half an hour, until he hears Steve punch something in the kitchen. He comes back out and stares at James on the couch.

“I'm gonna be next door,” he says, “stay here.”

James sits alone in the apartment, staring at his hands. There are flecks of Steve's blood still on them, and a lot more blood besides. The blood of hundreds of people. People killed because his handlers told him to kill them. No justification, no 'they did a bad thing', just, 'do it'. And he did. Why is no one concerned about those people? Why isn't S.H.I.E.L.D. concerned?

He hears the outer door open, and footsteps come towards the apartment. They stop at the door, and then he hears Darcy say, “What the _hell_ happened to you?”

Steve's reply is too soft for James to catch. 

“Okay, he _has_ to go,” Darcy says. “No, Steve, no... he has to...” Her voice softens. “Steve...” she murmurs.

Steve's left his phone on the coffee table, James notices. He picks it up and presses some buttons. The screen lights up and tells him to press a couple of buttons to 'unlock' it. There are four icons on the screen, one reading 'phonebook'. He studies the key pad for a moment, before pressing the corresponding key.

There's a long list of names: Bruce, Chinese takeout, Clint, Darcy, Elaine, Indian takeout, Jane, Natasha (James's breath catches as he looks at her new name), Pepper, Sam Lewis, Sam Wilson, and S.H.I.E.L.D.

“Okay,” James mutters to himself and hits call.

It's answered after one ring. “Yes, captain?”

“I tried to kill Captain America. You should put me in prison,” he says, and hangs up. He drops the phone back to the table as the front door opens.

Steve's face looks red as well as bruised – the swelling around his eye has gone down and left a fading purplish bruise in its wake. It'll be gone in a couple of hours, he guesses. Darcy is holding his hand tightly, body positioned protectively between the two of them. As if she could stop him if he wanted to go at Steve again. As if he couldn't snap her in two.

He squeezes his eyes shut and digs his knuckles into them.

“You've got to leave,” Darcy says sharply.

He drops his hands to his lap. “I know,” he says.

“Can we talk?” Steve says, stepping forward. Darcy seems unwilling to let go of his hand, so she steps forward too.

James shakes his head. “Let's not.”

Steve frowns. “Why not?”

“'cause... you don't wanna hear what I gotta say, Steve.”

“Yes, I do,” Steve says in a soft, pathetic voice.

James stands up, and Darcy's hand drifts to her bag. “No, you _don't_. You got a new best friend, now, you got _her_ ,” he says, jabbing his hand at Darcy. She raises her eyebrows. Maybe that's his problem, she isn't just Steve's wife, she's clearly his best friend too. “You don't need both of us, and clearly you made your choice.”

“Don't try to make me choose between of the two of you,” Steve says warningly.

“'cause you'd choose her?” he spits.

“'cause it's a shitty thing for a friend to do. I can have more than one, Buck.”

“Sure you can, and you got a lot of them, it seems like. But you don't need me. Not like you used to. You didn't for all those years after the serum. I hated that, Steve, I hated _you_ long before the Red Room.”

“The Red Room?” Steve repeats.

James shakes his head, backing up. “I don't wanna talk about that.”

“Okay...” Steve says. “Look, I understand--”

“You _don't_ understand!” James yells. Steve flinches, and even James is shocked at the outburst. “You don't understand,” he continues. “You'll never understand, and I don't _want_ you to understand.”

Steve frowns. Darcy's gaze flickers to him worriedly. “Why not?” he asks.

“Because...” James takes a ragged breath and another step backward. “Because I wouldn't wish _this_ – what's... what's in my head – on my worst enemy. Why would I want _you_ to know how I feel?”

Steve's eyes widen. “Bucky...” he says, just above a whisper.

“I called S.H.I.E.L.D.,” James says. “They're gonna put me in prison.”

“No,” Steve says. “You need...”

“I need to go to prison,” James says.

“You need help.”

James smiles. “Steve, I'm a criminal. I'm a... _big_ criminal. I gotta go to prison. You know I've got to go. You're Captain America, you don't protect criminals.”

“You're not a criminal,” Steve says. Darcy squeezes his hand harder.

“I am, and I've got to pay for my crimes.” He nods his head to Darcy. “She knows it.”

“Uh,” Darcy says, grimacing as Steve looks down at her. “I mean... maybe, yeah.”

Steve's shoulders slump and he sighs. “I thought I could help,” he says.

“You did. You _did_. I just... no one can make me right. I gotta do it for myself.”

The doorbell goes, and Darcy turns to get it. “Okay, I'll buzz you in,” she says to the person at the door.

Steve sighs and walks over to him. “This is the first thing I should have done,” he says, and hugs him. “I missed you,” he says.

“I missed you too,” James murmurs. He squeezes Steve harder, and pats him on the back. There's a curt knock at the door, and Darcy goes to answer it. James takes a breath and pulls away from Steve. “I guess that's my ride.”

“Um... okay,” Darcy says to the person, and when James looks up, his chest tightens.

She's as beautiful as he remembers. “Natalia,” he says.

“I go by 'Natasha' now,” she says. “Steve, Darcy.”

“Yeah, hey...” Darcy says, raising her hand in a half wave.

“Natasha,” Steve says tightly, mouth pursed.

“So, are you... arresting me?” James asks.

“I'm taking you somewhere,” she says, “and we should go. Now.”

“Um...” he mutters, glancing at Steve. “I think I should go... I want to go... to prison.”

“You aren't exactly going to have it easy with me,” Natasha says. She taps her wrist. “We need to go if we're going.”

“Go on,” Steve says, tipping his head towards the door.

“Are you... sure?”

“Jesus, Bucky, go before you haven't got a choice,” Darcy says.

He snorts. “Okay. Okay. Do I need anything?”

“Get your medication,” Natasha says. 

He rushes into his room and grabs the bottle off the night stand. Natasha impatiently taps her foot outside the door, and grabs his wrist as soon as he steps back out. “Come on.”

Steve and Darcy move towards the door with him, but Natasha holds up her hand. “Best you don't come out with us, just in case.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Okay. So.”

“I'll see you around,” James says. “Darcy, look after him.”

“Look after yourself,” she says, smiling.

“Bye, Steve,” he murmurs.

Steve takes a deep breath. “Bye.”

There's a nondescript car sitting outside that Natasha directs him to get into. When he pauses at the door, and clicks her tongue.

“Hurry up,” she says.

He gets into the cramped little car and stares out of the window. She jumps in and slams the door shut, revving the engine. He remembers a mission the two of them had once. She was nineteen, her hair all done up, face painted. They were in London, and he drove them around in a slick, fancy car. They had sex in the back of that car. It was the last time he saw her, until a few months ago.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asks.

She starts the car, and flicks her eyes to him. “I never do anything I don't want to do any more.”

“Can you stand to be around me?”

She sighs, readjusting the rearview mirror. “Yasha, sometimes I wonder how anyone can stand to be around me. But they do, and sometimes my company is even enjoyable. Making things right is a journey that people like us have to travel the rest of our lives.”

James looks at her, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. She spent most of her childhood in the Red Room – if she can move past it, then him, with his loving mother and little sister and his best friend and his long line of adoring girls, should be able to as well.

“Where are we going?” he asks.

She looks at him and smiles, mouth like a perfect red bow. “I know people, don't worry.”


	11. Chapter 11

**THREE MONTHS LATER**

Tanaka suggests that Darcy comes to one of his sessions, 'to get her perspective on things', and Steve feels himself blush as soon as he mentions it to Darcy while he's making dinner. He tries to be casual about it, but he can hear how his voice goes kind of funny at the end, and Darcy's got to hear it too. But all she says is, “Sure,” and run her fingertips across his back as she passes.

“It's very nice to meet you, Steve talks about you a lot,” Tanaka says at Steve's Friday afternoon appointment.

Darcy grins. “This is the part where I'm supposed to say, 'just good things, I hope', right?”

“When don't I say good things about you?” he asks.

“Charmer,” she murmurs.

Tanaka smiles and glances at her clipboard lying on the couch next to her. She hasn't written in it since the day he told her he didn't like it, but it's clearly a struggle for her. He feels kind of bad for stopping her, now, but he likes that she actually listened to him.

“Okay,” she says, “Steve has told me that we can talk about anything, but please stop me if you feel uncomfortable.”

Darcy shrugs. “Sure.”

“So, Steve, how have the nightmares been?” Tanaka asks.

“Better. Um... I haven't had any the past couple of weeks, and they're getting a lot less intense. I haven't woken Darcy up in a while.”

“Six weeks of undisturbed sleep,” Darcy says, wiggling her eyebrows. “Exciting.”

Steve laughs, clasping his hands together in his lap. “We lead very exciting lives.”

Tanaka smiles again. “So, in your opinion, Darcy, how do you think Steve is doing now?”

“He's a lot...” She looks at him and he smiles encouragingly. “He seems a lot happier. We both are. Everyone is. Everything just got a little... too much, for a while.”

“I don't have so many random crying jags any more,” Steve adds with a smile.

“Mm hm,” Tanaka says, giving him that long stare that always makes him feels like a misbehaving kid. “You use humour a lot to shift attention away from the issue, I've noticed.”

“He does,” Darcy says, nodding. She looks at him. “You do.”

“I do? But I'm not even funny...”

“You do it very subtly,” Tanaka says.

“You're very subtle,” Darcy says.

He pulls a face and laughs. “Now who's being funny...”

“Hey, my role in life is 'humorous sidekick', give me a break.”

“You're not the sidekick,” he says.

She smiles, and wraps her arm around his waist. Tanaka is smiling at the both of them, and he feels himself blush a little.

“Can we talk about Bucky?” she asks.

“Um... sure,” he says.

“You said last week that you felt bad for not missing him. How do you feel today?”

“I guess about the same. I... I miss when we were kids, but he was literally a whole other person when he came back. It kinda ruined some of my memories of us, I guess. I wanted so badly for him to be the guy I remembered, but that just didn't happen. And I guess... now, if he ever comes back, it's not going to be the same. Before... everything, I could tell myself that _if_ Bucky was alive, our friendship would be the same, and now that's been blown out of the water, and I can't lie to myself any more. I can't believe it any more.” Along with all the other things he's lost faith in – he's talked with her about his former religious faith, and it was uncomfortable and unsatisfying and he doesn't want to talk about it again.

Tanaka nods. “You know, it can be hard for anyone to maintain childhood friendships the way they used to be, and you have some very unique added problems with that. I think you're already coming to terms with that, as difficult as it is. And I think the most important thing at the moment is to keep in mind that there's nothing wrong with having created other, fulfilling, relationships since you lost Bucky.”

It all sounds like great advice – it's probably what he'd tell someone if he was asked, though maybe not quite so eloquently. Still.

“And accept that it's okay to not one hundred percent follow my advice,” she adds.

He snorts. “I can do that part, for sure.”

Tanaka smiles and turns her gaze to Darcy. “Let's talk about you and Bucky. Steve's told me that your relationship with Bucky was difficult?”

Darcy shrugs. “Well, I... I really wanted it to work out for Steve, and it was even my idea to have him stay with us, but it was kind of a disaster. Steve kinda... backslid a bit, with the nightmares and the panic attacks. And Bucky wasn't very nice to me – it was really just a bad idea all round.”

He takes a deep breath. He knew that Bucky didn't really like her – how could he _not_ have noticed, he's not that much of an idiot. He just sort of ignored the problem, hoping it would pass. Not his finest moment. 

“I'm sorry I let everything get out of control,” he says softly.

Darcy shakes her head. “It wasn't your fault.”

“Well, whose fault was it, then?”

“No one's,” she says. “Crazy Russian dudes' in the sixties. Not yours.”

“Do you believe her, Steve?” Tanaka asks.

He shrugs. “No.”

“Do you think she's lying to you?”

He shakes his head. “No. But I think that she might...”

“Don't tell me, tell Darcy,” Tanaka says.

He looks at Darcy. “I think that… one day you might realise that you can do better than me, and that I'm more trouble than I'm worth... Especially after everything with Bucky.”

“Are you serious? Are you really still on this?” she says, pressing her fingertips into his side. “I'm not going to blame you for anything, and definitely not stuff that you have zero control over.”

He smiles. He does believe that, most of the time. It's just that little bit of the time that he doesn't believe it that eats at him. “I know. I'm just... I'm a lot more of a mess than I thought I was, when we started dating...”

Darcy sighs. “Steve, I knew that you were a huge mess when we first met. It was, like, the first thing I mentioned to Jane.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“The first thing you told your best friend about me was that I was a mess?”

She wrinkles up her nose. “Well, it sounds bad when you put it like that...”

He laughs, and she smiles, stroking his side. “Everyone's a mess, in their own way. But everyone loves you, my parents, my grandparents, all of our friends. You know, Jane even has a crush on you.”

He frowns so hard that Darcy laughs, and even Tanaka smiles. “What? No, she doesn't.”

“Yeah, man, she does. You're totally her type. She's not going to put the moves on you, or anything, don't worry.”

“Okay...” he says, frowning at her. He honestly can't tell if she's kidding or not.

They talk for a while longer, about his nightmares, and Darcy's feelings about them, as well as better things, like Steve's comic, which he's been posting online to reasonable popularity – people seem to like his bland observations about life. By the time the appointment is over, Steve is, as always, relieved that it's over, but he also feels kind of overwhelmed with love for Darcy, even more than normal. He's never considered very deeply how she views his nightmares and panic attacks, other than finding them, and him, a nuisance. He's never thought about how she's learned to manage them, even when he's unaware of it. That takes... a lot of love for a person.

“I don't deserve you,” he says as they leave the office.

“Yes, you do,” she says, pulling her knitted cap on.

It's snowing a little when they get outside. Christmas is just three weeks away now, and Steve is pretty excited for it. Darcy's parents are coming to New York to stay for a couple of days, and while it's kind of terrifying – he's already identified about ten things in the apartment that need fixing before they see it – it's exciting too. He can barely believe that last Christmas was a year ago, that him and Darcy have been married for _ten months_. It all feels like yesterday.

Snow settles in his hair, and Darcy reaches up to brush it away. “You should be wearing a hat,” she says.

“Sorry. You decided on a dress for Tony's party yet?” Tony is throwing a big Christmas party in a few days, and since it's probably going to end up on at least a dozen websites and entertainment programmes, Darcy wants to look extra fancy.

“Not yet. I was going to ask if you wouldn't mind if we look around some stores?”

He shrugs. “Sure.”

She smiles and pushes herself up onto her tiptoes to kiss him. “I'm thinking red.”

“I like red,” he says.

“Yeah? You gonna play personal stylist for me?”

“I think I'm pretty stylish,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest.

Darcy throws her head back as she laughs.

“Hey...” he murmurs, as she redirects him towards a fancy looking store.

Darcy is kind of haphazard in her dress shopping (he wonders how much she must have driven Jane crazy when they bought her wedding dress), and she grabs a bunch of things off the racks with a slightly sour look on her face. He follows behind, scanning the dresses until he spots one long red dress.

“What about this one?” he asks, tapping her on the shoulder and pointing to it.

She turns around and looks at it. “Oh, I like that. Do you think it might be a little long, though? Long dresses make me look stumpy.”

“No, they don't,” he says. “And the skirt is about... twenty four inches, and you're five four so it'll come to... the middle of your calf muscle, I reckon.”

She looks at him and raises her eyebrows.

“What?” he asks, stuffing his hands in his pockets.

“And you say you aren't good at math,” she says, grabbing the dress off the rail.

“That's not math, that's just... knowing the distance between things.”

“Uh huh,” she murmurs, “come on, come give me your opinions.”

He sits in the changing room as she tries on the various dresses, dismissing some out of hand and tossing them over the door. There are a couple of other guys waiting on girlfriends and wives, and they all look bored, and he knows that guys complain about this kind of stuff, but he loves it. He loves getting to share in her life, loves that he gets to be involved in everything. It still occurs to him at the weirdest times that this beautiful women is his wife, and maybe he's never going to get over that. He hopes not.

She models a few dresses for him, and they're all really great, but it's the one that he pointed out that really takes his breath away.

“Wow...” he murmurs, “you look gorgeous.”

She spins around in a circle and grins. “Not bad, huh?”

“You're gonna be all the paparazzi are gonna notice,” he says.

“You think?” she asks, curling her fingers around the material of the skirt.

“If they're anything like me...” he says.

She crooks her finger and beckons him closer, which of course he does without thinking. “You're perfect, you know that?” she says, and pushes up onto her tiptoes to kiss his cheek.

“I'm getting there,” he says.

-

A couple of days before the party, Sam invites them over to his apartment. The temperature is rapidly dropping, so when he asks them to come up to the roof with him, Steve's immediately suspicious. Darcy's just plain irritated.

“I can see my breath,” she grumbles, shuffling tighter under Steve's arm. “Seeing your breath is Mother Nature's way of saying, 'yo, it's too fucking cold for you out here'.”

“You can go back inside in a minute,” Sam calls from behind Redwing's coop. “I just want to show you guys something.”

Steve has a terrible feeling that he knows what it is that Sam wants to show them. There's a couple seconds more rustling from across the roof, and then Sam reappears with a flourish and...

“Are those wings?” Darcy says.

“Remember when we talked about this, Steve?” Sam asks.

“I remember telling you no.”

“Yeah, well, I didn't listen to that bit,” Sam says, lifting his arms up. The... _wings_ look pretty well-constructed, out of some kind of thin black material attached to a body suit that resembles parachute gear. It looks a lot better made than what Sam would be able to make or pay for himself.

“Sam, who made it?” Steve says, narrowing his eyes.

“Uh.” Sam takes a few steps towards the edge of the roof and mumbles, “Stark.”

“Tony Stark?” Steve says.

“No, Ned Stark,” Sam says, then pulls a face. “That's from--”

“I know what it's from, thank you,” Steve says, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Oh, Captain America pose,” Sam mutters. “Look, man, I've tested it out already, and it works and it's cool and it's gonna be really good for my... superheroing. Look, just watch.” He turns around bends his knees a little and Darcy looks kind of alarmed.

“Are you going to let him...?” she asks as he takes a running jump. “Oh, too late I guess.”

Steve and Darcy run over to the edge to watch as Sam glides across the gap between his building and the neighbouring one. He lands with minimal stumbling, which is admittedly impressive, and turns around to give them the thumbs up.

“Awesome job not going splat on the concrete!” Darcy calls, before saying out of the corner of her mouth, “all our friends are nuts.”

“I _know_ ,” Steve says, pulling a face at her.

-

Tony's party is all that the gossip sites can talk about, and when Steve and Darcy arrive at the tower, photographers swarm immediately. Steve had wanted to arrive earlier and seek in around the back without anyone seeing them, but Pepper suggested that a little bit of exposure would hold off media, like 'throwing a bloody steak at a pack of hyenas' (Tony's words). So Steve grins and bears it as bright lights flash in their faces and reporters yell things.

“Who are you wearing, Darcy?” one guys shouts.

“The skins of my enemies!” she calls back.

Steve cracks up, pressing his hand to his mouth, and knows somehow that that's the picture that's going to be getting around the internet in a couple of hours.

Jane's already there, and she runs over to them as soon as they get into the lobby.

“This is so strange!” she says, the skirt of her purple dress fluttering around her legs. She's wearing flashing Christmas tree earrings. “Someone even took a picture of me!”

“Of course they did,” Darcy says, “you look hot. Doesn't she look hot, Steve?” she asks, looking up at him with a mischievous smile playing around her lips. She's really loving how uncomfortable it makes him when other people are attracted to him.

“You look very nice,” he says.

Jane grins. “Thank you. You look very nice too.” Darcy convinced him that it would be okay to wear jeans and a nice shirt instead of an actual suit. He isn't sure that this isn't in fact a do that's fancy enough that he should really wear a suit, but he does like being comfortable. It's probably the most comfortable he's going to be tonight, surrounded by celebrities and Tony's other friends.

“Hey, it's Santa's little helpers!” Tony calls as he strides towards them, Bruce following behind. “And... Santa, I guess?”

“Ho ho ho,” Steve mutters.

Tony grins and nods to a staff member who's hanging around in the background. “Dump your coats and come up. Not many people have arrived yet.”

Pepper comes over to greet them when they get upstairs to the beautifully decorated floor. There are Christmas trees and tinsel and lights everywhere, and it looks exactly like what Steve thinks Christmas should look like. He grins and Darcy kisses him on the cheek.

“You three look great!” Pepper says, hugging them in turn. Steve notices that she's suddenly as tall as he is and he looks down to find that she's wearing even higher heels than normal. It puts her at a good five or six inches taller than Bruce and just a little bit less with Tony, but only because Steve knows that he wears those lift things in his shoes. Even Jane is wearing heels that make her the same height as Bruce. Steve chuckles a little as everyone wanders off to talk to other people and get booze.

“What are you sniggering about?” Darcy asks.

“Everyone's so short,” he says.

“Hey!” she says, and lightly back hands him in the chest. “Remember who you're talking to here, buddy. Your wife is a fellow short ass.”

“Nah, you're just right,” he says. “And it's only funny when it's Tony, and maybe Bruce a bit, too.”

Darcy rolls her eyes. “Man, how old are you, fifteen?” She flags down a circling waiter and snags a couple of glasses for them. “Drink that and don't embarrass me,” she says.

Steve grins into the glass, and swerves to avoid some guy who looks familiar, but not familiar enough for Steve to want to talk to.

-

By nine thirty, the party's in full swing, and Steve has managed to avoid almost all celebrity attendees. It's not necessarily that he doesn't, or wouldn't, like them, or that – like some people might believe – he thinks that modern music/TV/film etc. is to be scorned. He just... really has trouble with new people. It's not shyness, exactly, he's not shy, he just feels more comfortable staying in the small circle of friends he's created for himself. Tanaka has been working with him on branching outside of it, and maybe he will, but not tonight, at Christmas, when he's perfectly content to trail around after Darcy.

Clint arrives a little after ten, moving practically unseen through the crowd. Steve hasn't spoken to him very much, mostly because he's rarely around, but Steve's almost certain that he knows where Natasha and Bucky are. He hasn't asked, and the official word from S.H.I.E.L.D. is that Natasha 'went rogue', though they haven't seemed overly concerned about it so far.

Steve wanders off to get food from one of the many huge kitchens in the tower, leaving the networking to Sam, who is having an absolute _ball_ living it up with movie stars and superheroes.

Tony has tons of food laid out, mostly for Steve's benefit, he was careful to point out. Steve had just rolled his eyes, but now that he's hungry, he is grateful for the spread.

Jane's in there too, sitting on a counter, licking frosting off her fingers. “Oh,” she says, swinging her legs a little, her shoes abandoned on the floor, “hey.”

“Hey,” he says, scanning the table of food. The chocolate log looks good.

“Hungry or hiding?” Jane asks.

He grabs a plate and cuts off a generous slice. “Both?”

She smiles. “Me too. Grad school doesn't really prepare you for a party like this. I never intended to be a... celebrity scientist, or whatever.”

“Yeah, I felt like that when I was on tour. It feels so strange to become a celebrity for no reason.”

Jane nods. “I keep forgetting that you did all that stuff in the forties, before you started... superheroing.”

He chuckles, eating a forkful of cake. It tastes as good as it looks. “Y'know, so do I sometimes.”

“Was it fun?”

“It was...” He scratches the back of his head. “Sometimes, I guess? I was on the road a lot, with a bunch of really great girls who took me under their wing. I hated all the... glitz and stress of it, but I guess there was a sense of camaraderie in it.”

They chat for a few more minutes, and raid the fridge for whipped cream before reluctantly going back out to the party. 

Jane jams her shoes back on and pulls a face. “These things are so uncomfortable, I wish I'd just stuck to sneakers.”

“Look who you're talking to,” he says, “I wear spandex tights and knee high red boots for a living.”

She grins, and he turns to look for Darcy when someone yells, “kiss!” 

That someone just happens to be Tony, and Steve narrows his eyes. “Huh?”

Tony points up, and Steve's doesn't even need to look. _Mistletoe_. 

“Kiss!” Darcy shouts, bouncing into view beside Tony. Steve pulls a face at her, and she shrugs. “I'm drunk!”

“Ugh,” Jane sighs, and puts a hand on Steve's shoulder, pressing a kiss to Steve's cheek. Steve's already blushing.

Tony boos, and shouts something about it not being in the spirit of Christmas, but the loose crowd that had gathered loses interest, and so does Tony. Darcy holds her arms out to Steve, and he glares at her as she hugs him.

“Oh, baby, I'm sorry, was it terrible?”

“You're terrible,” he says, holding her tighter.

Tony seems to be on mistletoe hunt, and pops up to encourage people to lock lips whenever they pass underneath. When he catches Bruce and Jane stands underneath a sprig, his whole face lights up, and Steve can just imagine the torture that he thinks he's about to inflict. Steve raises an eyebrow at Darcy, who sniggers under her breath.

“Kiss, kiss, kiss!” Tony chants.

Bruce looks up at the mistletoe and then at Jane. From Steve's perspective, they look kind of amused, but he doubts that Tony is picking up on that. Jane squares her shoulders and turns to Bruce, and Bruce clears his throat, and Tony looks like he's enjoying the hell out of them lengthening the whole process. Then Bruce rocks forward and kisses Jane on the lips, and she closes her fingers around his arm for a moment. Tony's eyes go wide.

“Damn, Bruce,” he says, grinning as they move apart. The kiss wasn't much more than a peck, not exactly incriminating, but Steve's still pretty surprised.

“That's my girl,” Darcy murmurs.

By midnight, after some awkward dancing and one guy who Steve recognised from the TV jokingly suggesting a 'wife swap', which Darcy sweetly turned down with a, 'what on Earth would I want to swap for?', they start to drift into a private room on the other side of the floor.

Clint throws himself onto a couch and sighs. “There was a lot of bullshit happening back there.”

“Yep,” Darcy says, kicking her shoes off and flopping down beside Jane in an armchair, forcing her to scoot over. Bruce is sitting on the floor, leaning against the chair, and Jane keeps running her fingertips over the back of his hair, though no one else seems to notice. Steve leans against the armrest and stretches his arms over his head.

“Think we can slip out soon?” he asks.

“Yeah, pretty soon,” Darcy says, and covers her mouth as she yawns.

The door opens and Tony and Rhodey come in. “So, _this_ is where you all got to,” Tony says. “You are an unsociable bunch of people, you know that? Steve's buddy Sam is still out there, living it up.”

“Good for him,” Clint mutters.

“And get your feet off my upholstery, Barton,” Tony adds, walking over to the liquor cabinet. Rhodey nods to Steve and sits down on the armrest of the couch. Steve still doesn't know Rhodey very well, but if he can be Tony's best friend for more than two decades, he must be approaching sainthood. 

“When do parties like this normally wrap up?” Steve asks.

“Eh... when it starts to get light? But I'm gonna throw everyone out in a couple of hours, let Happy handle it.”

“Nice of you,” Steve murmurs.

“What? It gives Happy something to do, and I need my beauty sleep.”

“You'll need a lot of it,” Clint mutters, arm flung over his eyes, feet still on the couch.

“Oh, hardy-di-fucking-ha,” Tony says, and taps Clint's legs. “Move 'em or I'll just sit on them.”

Clint grumbles and twists his body so that he's lying diagonally with his feet on the floor. Tony sits down in the vacated space. “Why is everyone congregated over there?” he asks.

Steve shrugs. Jane has withdrawn her hand now, and it looks like Bruce has fallen asleep. Darcy is playing with her phone and Steve is just kind of bored.

The door opens again and Pepper looks in. “There you are,” she says to Tony. “Are you coming back out? Angelina is asking after you.”

“ _Angelina_?” Clint repeats. “I knew there was a reason I hated you.”

“Tell her to leave her gift on the table, I'm not taking any more callers,” Tony says.

Pepper tuts good-naturedly, and pulls her heels off at the door, padding across the room barefoot and into an adjoining one. Tony suddenly looks nervous, Steve notices, his hand rubbing up and down his pant leg. Steve frowns as Tony makes a couple of abortive moves to get up, before he finally does and follows Pepper into the room, closing the door behind him.

“High score!” Darcy cheers quietly, and Steve looks down at her phone. “I have mastered the angry birds!” she says, and he smiles.

“Insert Hawkeye joke here,” Clint murmurs.

Steve laughs and opens his mouth to say something when he's interrupted.

“ _Tony Stark, what are you--?_ ” they all hear Pepper exclaim. Even Bruce jerks awake and looks over.

“What's happenin'?” he mumbles, rubbing his eyes.

“I dunno,” Steve says, looking back at the door. He can hear them speaking softly, but can't make out the words – the tower's walls are a lot better made than the apartment's. There are a couple of thumps and what sounds like a squeal – which he's pretty sure is from Tony – before the door opens again.

“You guys killing each other in there?” Clint asks, sitting up slowly.

“Um...” Pepper says, eyes shiny and mouth tipped up in funny sort of smile.

“Tony...” Bruce says, and Tony grins at him. “Did you finally...?”

“Yes!” Tony says, bouncing on his toes a little. “And she said yes!”

Rhodey gets up. “You agreed to marry this idiot?”

“Yes?” Pepper says, her voice going high as she smiles. They hug and then everyone's hugging, except Clint, who gets a phone call and slips out of the room. Steve seems to be the only person to note his absence.

“Steve!” Tony says, clapping him on the shoulder. “You realise I'm going to be hitting you up for marriage advice now, right?”

“Just do what she tells you and you'll be fine,” he says.

Tony smiles. “Same as ever, then.”

“I think we need more champagne,” Darcy says, ducking out of the huddle to go over to the liquor cabinet. “Or maybe just tequila!” she calls as she looks through the cupboards.

“I'll get it,” Tony says, going over to help her.

Bruce looks up at Steve. “Can't believe he actually did it,” he murmurs.

“I know, and without telling anyone first.”

“That bit doesn't surprise me,” Rhodey says. “He doesn't respect the opinions of others very often, why start with something this important?”

“Yeah...” Steve says, attention caught by the door opening again. 

Clint leans in and nods to him. “Hey, Steve, can you come out here for a sec?”

He looks at Bruce, who shrugs, and walks over to Clint. “What's up?”

“C'mon. Don't punch me or anything.”

Steve follows him down the corridor. “Why would I punch you?”

“Hold that thought,” Clint says as they round the corner.

“Hey, Steve,” Bucky calls.

Steve blinks and jerks a little. Bucky pushes off from the wall he's leaning against and smiles at him. “Well, don't stand there with your mouth hangin' open, idiot.”

“You... I wasn't... expecting to see you,” Steve says slowly, holding himself back. Suffocating Buck was half the problem last time. Natasha's standing a couple of feet away, arms crossed over her chest.

“Sorry to break up the party,” Bucky says with a smirk. He looks good, his face has filled out and lost its drawn quality, his clothes fit, his skin doesn't have that sick pallor to it any more. And the smirk on his face is familiar and makes Steve think of dares to ride the fastest rides at Coney Island, not being throttled by a stranger wearing his best friend's face.

“I, I... don't know what to say to you,” he says slowly.

Bucky sighs. “I know. I'm sorry.”

“It's not your fault,” he murmurs. “So, uh, how are you? Are you okay?”

“I'm better, I'm a lot better. What about you?”

“Yeah, I'm... good,” he says, rubbing at the back of his neck. 

“Steve?” Darcy calls. “Bruce said you came out here...?” She rounds the corner and stops. “Oh.”

“Darcy,” Bucky says, winking at her.

She arches an eyebrow and comes to Steve's side, pressing her hand to the small of his back. “Bucky.”

“You look very nice.”

She narrows her eyes. “Uh huh.”

Bucky laughs and looks at the floor. “Yeah, fair enough.”

Steve swallows. “Are you staying?”

“Nah, we gotta get going, me and Natasha are going be... travelling for a while. I just didn't want to go without at least wishing you a merry Christmas.”

Steve smiles. “I'm glad you did.”

Bucky nods. “Also I got one of those cell phones now. So, uh, you wanna... exchange numbers or whatever people do these days?”

“Uh, okay,” Steve mutters, fumbling to get his phone out of his pocket.

It takes a few minutes of fiddling for him to put Bucky's number in his phone, and he can feel how much Darcy is itching to do it for him, but he perseveres and gets it done. When it comes time for Bucky to do the same, he just frowns at the phone, and Darcy snatches out of his hand. Bucky laughs, and Steve feels a knot of tension loosen inside of him.

“Hey, is everything okay out here?” Bruce calls from down the hall.

Darcy hands Bucky his phone back as Bruce reaches them. “Oh,” Bruce says, frowning a little. “Nice to see you again... James.”

“Bucky,” Bucky says, and Steve's chest constricts for a moment. “Natasha said that you really helped Steve out when I was... not myself. So thanks.” He offers his hand, and Bruce takes it.

“I just hung around outside,” he says, “I didn't do anything.”

“You helped,” Bucky says decisively.

“How did Natasha even know that, she wasn't there.” Steve asks. 

Bucky glances around out where Natasha and Clint are talking quietly, both with their arms crossed over their chests, looking tense. Bruce makes a quiet retreat. “Think she's got informants everywhere, honestly.”

Steve nods. “So, where've you been the last couple of months?”

Bucky makes a vague gesture with his hands. “Around...? Went up to Arizona – you know Rebecca lives up there? I've got a bunch of nieces and nephews, grand-nieces and nephew, and a few great grands, too.”

“Becky's still alive?” Steve says, and for Darcy's benefit adds, “Rebecca is Bucky's sister. I hadn't even thought...”

“I was pretty surprised she was still alive,” Bucky says. “It was... emotional.”

“Bucky,” Natasha calls. She and Clint have finished their conversation, and he looks kind of pissed. “We'd better get going. The plane...”

“The plane?” Steve repeats.

“Yeah, we're... going somewhere. Best I don't tell you about it.” He holds his hand out to Steve, and when Steve takes it he reels him in for a hug. 

“Oof,” Steve mutters, patting him on the back. “It's good to see you... well.”

Bucky steps back. “Good to be well. Or, well-er, at least. Is that a word?”

Steve chuckles. “No.”

“Ah, well.” He looks at Darcy. “Darcy, I'm sorry I was such an asshole to you.”

She shrugs. “'sall good. I've known assier.”

“Yeah, this is the girl for you, punk,” Bucky says, as Natasha approaches and starts hustling him away. She smiles and nods at Steve, but doesn't stop to talk. Probably a good idea, he's trying to put his anger at her behind him, but he's not quite there yet.

“Oh, shut up, jerk,” Steve calls as they retreat.

Darcy grins. “I like this side of you,” she says, leaning up to hug him.

“Me too,” he says, burying his nose into her hair.

“So, you mad at me for keeping stuff from you?” Clint asks, wandering back over to them.

Steve sighs, loosening his grip on Darcy only a little. “Oh, God, I don't even want to talk about any of that right now. Blanket forgiveness for tonight, okay?”

Clint shrugs. “Fine by me, man.”

“Hey, why's everyone out here?” Tony yells from the door. “Get back in here! God, it's like herding cats with you people!”

Steve stoops and sweeps Darcy off her feet. “M'lady?”

She laughs and kisses the bridge of his nose. Clint makes a gagging sound.

“And you can shut up too,” Steve says, following the sound of Tony's off key singing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally done! I'm considering writing about what Bucky and Natasha got up to as a separate fic, since I think it would require more than a single chapter at the end of a Steve-centric fic to do any justice to.
> 
> Other things: I had specific dresses in mind for Jane and Darcy at the party, which perhaps some people already guessed - [Darcy](http://i.imgur.com/gqp5LZd.jpg) and [Jane](http://i.imgur.com/sHQ30bA.jpg) (and if you're reading _Awkward._ , yep, it's the same dress that she wore that Bruce liked). Also, the comic that Steve briefly refers to is very much based on [Steve Roger's American Captain comic](http://americancaptaincomic.tumblr.com/), which I highly, highly recommend, and fits really well with my Steve.


End file.
